I survived a night drinking with Stuart Langridge
Hot on the heels of surviving South By SouthWest, I survived a night drinking with Stuart Langridge.
Stuart is a crazed ginger open-source commie and JavaScript geezer who works for Canonical, who make Ubuntu. He works from home, as do I, so we occasionally get together at the traditional Canonical-Opera Synergy Facility that is The Welly in Central Birmingham. This is a pub so hard-core they don’t serve food (though you can bring your own in and they’ll give you a plate). This is a pub without jukebox or one-armed bandit. Its one permanent concession to entertainment is a darts board and the occasional Cheese night (“bring your own exciting cheeses”). In short, this is a pub for beer and conversation.
So, over seven (or was it eight?) pints of real ale, we conversed. The topics included:
- Why you can’t float table cells and rows around a page. I remember doing some tests years ago with absolutely positioning table cells, but if you float an element, it disregards the
display:blockrule that you need to use to remove its inherent “tableness” - The excellence of the Debenhams personal shopper service when taking daughters on shopping trips
- Why CouchDB is splendid, and why it should be proposed to the WHATWG and Web Apps group as the in-browser database for “HTML5″
- How you can’t completely divorce markup and styling, even in HTML5, largely because of inadequacies in CSS
- Alexis Deveria’s jQuery implementation of the CSS Template Layout Module
- Whether anyone will ever use
hgroup - Why Apple fanboys are the most annoying type of fanboys
- The nice people we know in the Web world
- The licensing of
H.666H.264 and MP3 and how to reward innovation without absurd software patents - How to write RESTful APIs (Stuart wrote me an API earlier in the week)
- The burden of book authoring and the pitfalls of book titles
- Whether libraries are too much abstraction from native code, or whether it matters anyway
- The marvels of the Sarissa library
- The outrageous price of beer in London
A splendid evening.
7 Responses to “ I survived a night drinking with Stuart Langridge ”
The outrageous price of beer in London is lessened at lovely Sam Smith’s. So, you know, you two should really do a collaborative conversational rendezvous synergy with Pub Standards sometime with some of us nice web-world people 🙂
I’d forgotten we talked about half that stuff 🙂 Personal Shopper booked, though. Preparing myself for much dad credit.
Anyway, http://www.pubstandards.co.uk/ has details of the pub…
You mean the Bricklayer’s Arms in Fitzrovia. That’s the monthly Pub Standards pub (see Stu supplied you with a URL already). It is a good little pub, although it was awfully warm in there that day for standards.next (or was that just the @media hangover?).
Um, I’d like to have the same conversation with you guys about CSS Template Layout. I’ll take the drinking as well, but I barely survived the last night of drinking with *both* of you in Amsterdam– more than a year later I think I’m still hung over. We’ll spare everyone the details of exactly *which* doors you were banging on in the wee hours. Ahem.
You mean to say he didn’t discuss his favourite former Liverpool players!? I couldn’t survive a night of that.