First was Over the Air 2011, on a beautiful summer-like day in Bletchley Park. I spoke on how to make sites that work well across devices in a presentation called Web Anywhere: Mobile Optimisation With HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript.

Next week saw me jetting off to Amsterdam for Fronteers 2011. This has, I think, become the best conference in Europe; the level of talks is high (the audience has a disproportionate number of working group members, high-profile developers and all-round smart people, never mind the speakers!) and the fact that Fronteers is not allowed to make a profit means that they can keep it cheap. I confess to being a bit nervous for my talk — the topic they gave me of “HTML5 semantics” doesn’t exactly cause your average web developer to moisten his seat with enthusiasm, but it was a single-track conference so I didn’t find myself alone in a hall while eveyone went to hear Lea Verou on gradient sexiness instead.

As well as looking at some of the new semantics, I wonder whether we need more than the current spec allows, then wonder whether semantics matter anyway (tl,dr: yes, they do) and suggest that, if you’re just squirting obfuscated JavaScript down a line with no real semantics, and targetting one single rendering engine, you’re really just reinventing Flash but with the browser as the plugin. This follows some of my recent posts such as Future friendly, or Forward to Yesterday?, HTML5, hollow demos and forgetting the basics and the toe-tappin’ Web Standards Hoedown.

Anyhow, I must have done something right as 99,000 people have viewed the slides on slideshare in 3 weeks. (Slides: You too can be a bedwetting antfucker). Here’s the video:

Those nice people at Fronteers have transcribed the video, too.

By clever planning, I flew home from Amsterdam on Saturday in order to fly to Norway on Sunday (via Amsterdam). I was there to MC the Frontend conference where the organisers used large stand-up cartoons of me to entice the Oslo ladies in.

Frontend had one of the weirdest conference parties I’ve been to; we sat in an ex-church, drinking red wine and beer and listened to Oslo’s leading Norwegian-language Calypso band.

From the conference, I went by taxi an Opera event for journalists where I was tasked with stopping the journos becoming mutinous or falling into jetlag slumber during a 20 minute bus ride from their hotel to a restaurant. Rather than sing the Web Standards Hoedown without Ukelele or hippie, I was able to finally realise a long-held ambition of doing a completely fictional bus tour. On our way to downtown Oslo, I was therefore able to point out to my increasingly incredulous fellow-travellers the summer palace of King Gustav The Mad, the high school that was long believed to be the only Norwegian building visible from space and the very tree in which John Lennon wrote Norwegian Wood.

A full three days elapsed before I travelled down to Lahndahn to do a guest Q&A talk at a Kazing HTML5 training course (lots of questions about DART, privacy on the Web and Web vs Native) and then the next day, an overview of HTML5 at HTML5 Live where I pissed on a few bonfires by pointing out

• HTML5 is nothing to do with mobiles
• a website that is ugly and full of nonsensical jargon remains so even if sprinkled with HTML5 fairydust
• a site that fulfills an organisational need rather than user need remains a vanity turd even if sprinkled with HTML5 fairydust

Narrowly avoiding a lynch party, I escaped up the M11 with Jake Archibald where we boarded a RyanAir flight to Krakow in Poland to speak at the inaugural Frontrow conference. Poland is super country, and Krakow seems a delightful city from my brief walks around its pretty centre.

I was also thrilled, on learning that it’s pronounced “Crack Off”, to find this mini-guide to the city in my room:

Full marks to Mariusz, Olga and the rest of the organising committee for a really great line-up mixing Polish and foreign speakers. Congratulations to my old chum Patrick Lauke on his first conference keynote The once and future web. I spoke about HTML5 Multimedia to a small group of people at 9 am on the second day (the day after the conference party, which went on til 6 am!).

After an eventful return flight which arrived 4 hours late (and meant at least that RyanAir couldn’t play their stupid arrival fanfare), I spoke at a conference of 148 venture capitalists and other investors organised by UBS – and I wasn’t even wearing cuff-links!

Just two more talks this year – one at Staffordshire Universtity and one at Heart and Sole in Portsmouth on 18 November, and I’ll be attending two events for my own training – Full Frontal and Seb Lee-Delisle’s Creative JavaScript training in Leeds.

I’m very much enjoying Aus. It feels like England done right: good weather, laid-back attitude and fabulous hot-pants (not me, obviously). The only downside is the vast pantheon of comically venomous creatures that lurk round every corner. In Canberra I was even warned about evil swooping magpies.

The tour so far has been great; sell-out crowds and really, really clued-up (“cluey”) attendees and great people like Russ Weakley, Ruth Ellison who I’ve long admired but never met.

The flight from Canberra to Melbourne yesterday was somewhat fraught; we took off two hours late due to what was variously reported as “mechanical trouble”, “bad weather in Melbourne” and “a catering mishap that was particularly unpleasant”. (At least it wasn’t exploding engines.) On arrival the doors wouldn’t open and the fuselage rocked as the ground staff attempted to bash the doors open with the airbridge. We arrived at the venue with only minutes to spare.

Now I’m having a weekend (shifted forward by a day as I fly to Perth on Sunday morning) in Melbourne with my old and dear friend Pippa. We’ve already seen a park full of flying foxes and are off to see Kangawallabats at the zoo tomorrow. Tonight I’m cooking us pork stirfry noodles and gyoza and there is a case of beer to drink.

The oil’s sizzling. Gotta go.

I’ve had similar double-takes with Japanese toilets. I went to Satoshi and Akane’s house for a lovely meal and, as you do after lots of soup and beer, felt the natural urge to micturate. Although they have a lavish toilet control panel (all of them do) I couldn’t work out how to flush.

After asking my gracious hosts, I learned that it was activated by infra-red. This is in contrast with the toilet in my hotel room, whose control panel had English language controls, and squirted water up my bum and around my bum at user-selectable strength (below), but didn’t seem to have a flush button.

I eventually located a traditional manual flush on the opposite side of the toilet bowl, and satisfactorily dismissed my ablutions.

Most Japanese toilets have heated seats, which is a bit of a win but odd when alone in a hotel room as you can’t help but wonder who has snuck in to poo while you were cleaning your teeth. Many flush for an inordinately long time automatically the instant you sit down; I’m told so that this means you’re unable to hear the sound of ladies urinating, as it’s masked by the flushing sound. I suppose that if you’re bashful about exposing the fact that ladies pee (they do, you know!) this would be a useful solution in a traditional thin-walled Japanese house in which sound would travel easily.

This theory might be borne out by the testimony of a lady attendee of the Web Directions East conference who told me that each ladies’ loo in the conference venue (consequent apologies for lack of photo) has a button marked “flushing sound” that played a loud recording of the sound of flushing, presumably to conserve water.

(@johnmcc sent a photo of a loo with a “flushing sound” button.)

Talking of water conservation, the apotheosis of lavatorial environmental responsibility was witnessed in my colleague Daniel’s apartment. On flushing the toilet (a laudably easily accomplished action, I might add), the tap on a small sink mounted above the cistern started automatically. I washed my hands and wondered how to turn the tap off. Then the brilliance of the design hit me: instead of re-filling a closed cistern, the washbasin drained the soapy water into the reservoir below, thereby flushing the toilet with the grey water that the previous visitor had washed his/ her hands in while simultaneously saving space in the compact Tokyo dwelling.

Genius. If I could work out a way to import them and sell them in the UK I’d make a million.

Like two years ago when I travelled to Jakarta for the first time, I was weirded out by how familiar it felt: the elevated roads, skyscrapers and purposeful crowds reminded me of the four years in spent in Bangkok.

Just like two years ago, it was extra-strange when I realized that I had no language. I’m fluent in Thai, so it’s immensely frustrating not to be able to speak to people here.

Of course, after the superficial feeling of familiarity, the differences became apparent. The streets aren’t full of pot holes. The food is very different. There are ten bajilion vending machines where n Thailand there would be noodle vendors. The toilet in my hotel has more controls than the bridge of the starship enterprise. It’s not all different though: the women are, like Thai and Indonesian women, jaw-droppingly gorgeous.

The Japan-resident HTML5 Doctor, Oli, picked me up and we rode a pleasantly non-crowded train to Satoshi’s house, where I’m drinking a very welcome cold Kirin beer before dinner and writing this on John’s iPad.

I’ve wanted to visit Tokyo for twenty years and now I’m finally here. Yay!

(Photos)

I spoke at Over The Air, and met Sir Tim Berners-Lee who asked me to sign a copy of Introducing HTML5 that I gave him (swoon!).

I’ve written HTML5: The Facts And The Myths with Remy for Smashing Magazine, which has attracted lots of comments.

I’ve also done an interview with Remy (the editors have edited me to call him “Sharp” throughout, as though we were both pupils at Eton or something) in which we say crazy things like “you don’t have to use canvas, and you don’t have to immediately switch to HTML5″. It’s called HTML5: The 900-Page Gorilla with a Wide Ensemble.

A nice review of our book was published by Peter Steen Høgenhaug, noting that we “relate every part of HTML5 to accessibility”, which is great as that’s exactly what we set out to do.

I spent last week in Stockholm, giving 4 presentations, checking out the marvellous Vasa Museum and autographing a copy of our book with a picture of a unicorn and a double rainbow (Unicorns, butterflies, ribbons, rainbows & fluffy kittens feature on page 35 of the book).

And there are still quite a few talks to give before the end of 2010!

I tracked down my old friend Asiye, who taught me lots of Turkish in 1993, and who I hadn’t seen since the year 2000 when we bumped into each other, utterly by chance, in the street in Bangkok. (Her Fethiye clothing shop, Şaman, has the strapline “there are no coincidences”.)

I think we can safely say that in 17 years neither Asiye nor I have changed one jot. Then:

Now:

And I’m delighted that there was no reason for my earlier holiday trepidation.