To Singapore! (and other unrelated things)

I have been a bit away from the blog lately as I was working on DevTools stuff, and also preparing my upcoming talks this and next week, but I realised that I do miss a good old-fashioned bit of stream-of-consciousness blogging, so here it goes:

Wish me an upgrade

Writing this at the airport, while I hope a big slide deck that Helen has shared with me finishes downloading with this wi-fi. Which is still going at 300mb/second, which for all my hotel wifi standards is AMAZING, but when I said "big" I really meant "big"!

I have also been asking everyone I've talked to today to wish me for a flight upgrade. The last time I flew long distance in this direction I had a very strange experience on the morning: I was going to the park for a run, with my headphones and everything plugged in. Then an old frail woman who was trying to load something onto her car asked me for help. I didn't hear her initially, but I understood what she meant. I took the headphones out anyway, and started helping her, and she was already thanking me. The stuff was really big and heavy furniture--I don't really know how she ever thought she could load it on the car herself, but I do not know the full background. Perhaps she had explained in the time it took me to remove the headphones! Anyway, I finished loading that stuff into the car and her gratefulness intensified:

Oh God bless you! BLESS YOU DARLING! THANK YOU SO MUCH! THANK YOU!

I wanted to get going, and I was also a bit overwhelmed with so much gratefulness. I wished her a good day, and left. This had been a bit of an strange experience, I thought. I did my run, went back, eventually got myself to the airport. And checked in. I was wandering around in the airport so I could get myself REALLY tired and then get some sleep when I got in the plane (more about this in my SLEEP travel hacks post), and then I happened to check my boarding pass on the phone to see if the gate had been announced. That wasn't the case, but my seat was different---I had been upgraded!

Scientifically speaking, I can't connect the two incidents with a straight face, but sometimes it's cool to pretend that good acts truly build good karma and good things happen to the enacters.

Obviously I've been trying to find chances to do a good act today. I went for an early run in the park, and paid close attention to my surroundings trying to find some elder woman in need of my help, but so far I've failed miserably... bah!

Singapore

I'm quite excited to visit Singapore for more than a short layover in Changi Airport, which is my entire experience of Singapore to date. I have heard the Botanical Gardens are a thing of beauty, and since I like green stuff, it's probably the only thing I'm really keen on going to when I'm done with the talks and conferences.

I will be speaking at CSS Conf Asia in two days, which will feel like one day thanks to the fact that I'll spend more than half a day in a plane. Excuse me for the jetlag slurred talk already.

Then on Sunday I'll be joining the Web Audio hack day for a bit before leaving for Melbourne for JSConf.AU---but that's for a different post!

Last week-end

I was quite offline last week-end. I literally didn't touch a computer in two days (unless you consider a phone a computer, but hey).

We did one of those "week-ends in the continent" escapes and went to Torino, which I'd never been to before. It was quite an interesting place--not as "fashion-driven" as Milano, but not as "food-focused" as Bologna. I really liked the Lingotto building, and the race track! The Mole Antonelliana is such a weird and surreal experience--cinema museum included. The archeology of cinema exhibition is super interesting: lots of old machinery and the evolution of moving images. Then... a very odd experience / installation which didn't make much sense, but made sense within the weirdness of the building itself. The whole thing was like being inside a dream. I also liked that the interactives were mostly aimed at adults, not at kids, although the kids could also enjoy them. But it meant that the interactives were not oversimplified!

I also happened to find a book I didn't buy the last time I was in Italy because I thought I could just buy it when I came back to London, but I was wrong because it was out of stock EVERYWHERE, and had been regretting ever since. Then, I come back to Italy, and... it was as if the book was waiting for me in the first design bookshop I visited. So perfect.

I'm liking Italy more and more each time I visit. I have been learning some Italian as well, which is moderately easy since I know Spanish and Catalan. I am still not really fluent but I can understand most of what I hear--and make myself understood in restaurants and taxis, etc, so I'm really pleased.

The other cool thing of learning Italian is that I can get books in Italian and not have to wait for or look for the English translation! So I also got a Bruno Munari book--he's such an interesting figure and his advice is still super current nowadays.

PS Ah, the slide deck finished loading! just as I was going to hit POST. Yay!

PS2 Helen just published this post about the new Responsive design view in DevTools! Woot! Apart from also drawing the Internet Mascot

https://twitter.com/helenvholmes/status/801077140045316097

😏