Despite a long held fascination with time and calendar systems I've never been very good at time management - I once turned up late for a symposium on timekeeping. My weakness is I love a new creative challenge and find it hard to say no to something that sounds like fun. Consequently I get myself over committed.
So a few months ago, i committed to something that for one reason or another hasn't quite happened yet. This post is a very public kick up the GANTT chart to make sure I get it done.
In one of my other lives I write for FlashMagazine, the venerable independent Flash news site. I've done it for years and it's great fun. We cover all the big conferences and through that you get to meet lots of interesting people.
I've known Aral Balkan for a number of years. Long enough that I'd say we were good friends. At the end of last year we met for some lunch and he told me about his plans for an online web conference. This became Singularity and is now the <HEAD> conference. It sounded like fun (my weakness) and I offered to help out.
My role so far has been advising on all the temporal gymnastics required to make the con' work across all the timezones. In addition to that I'm going to put a Flash app together to show the speaker schedule in the users local time. This is the bit I haven't started and the main reason for this post.
The schedule (or should that be scHEADule) presents some interesting temporal problems. In addition to spanning timezones, the weekend of the conference happens to fall during the daylight saving transition here in Europe. Making sure I catch all of these gotchas is going to be fun and I will of course cover all these here in the journal.
