So my old mucker Dan Champion is gradually taking over the world. If he’s not collecting some kind of award for being an accessibility nerd, he’s telling people how to build websites, as well as building new social sites of his own. And this time he even managed to get the people from PSF to host a “Dan Champion” workshop event.

Which I was kindly invited to speak at, to give a little overview of quality assurance — or at least the testing part of quality assurance. Well that was Wednesday, weren’t it? I thoroughly enjoyed the day and thought it went really well — I only hope others felt the same!

Indeed my only real disappointment is that I didn’t get a chance to properly speak to some bloke called Teddie from Neutralize to tell him how much I’d enjoyed listening to him talk about SEO. It would have been nice if their site validated though, or even had alt attributes for some of the images on the home page. Tut tut, very naughty.

It was jolly nice to actually see some people I’ve met online before — although I didn’t really get to have much of a conversation with Stephen Lang, which would have been nice. It was also nice that the famous Grim Jon political satirist extraordinaire who is well known to readers of PSF was there. However his secret identity still protected by Ian Dunmore, so while I know he was there, I don’t know who he was exactly.

Hmm … there was one chap dressed entirely in black, with a broad-brimmed hat covering his face, a flowing black cape with the initials “GJ” on it, who cackled evilly from time to time. I wonder if that was him?

Somebody (who knows perfectly well who they are) also mentioned that they were off to some kind of massive pornography emporium which was apparently just round the corner in their lunch break and then came back and complained — telling me it had been replaced by some kind of “tacky” shop. Frankly I dread to even think what could have been tacky in comparison to that.

It was also nice to go for a pint with Paul Canning, Ian Dunmore and Dan after the event too, even if Ian did try his best to completely forget all of the assessment sheets he’d spent all day urging everyone to fill in and leave them in the pub. Fortunately, yelling “Ian, you daft bugger, you’ve forgotten these!” at him seemed to do the trick…

It was less nice to have to get up at about five o’clock in the morning in order to be able to make my way down there in time, and it wasn’t great to not get home much before eleven at night having spent seemingly the majority of the day cramped into a small train seat, but the single worst thing about the day was the venue.

Not the building itself, which was very nice. It was just the fact that only a week after my beloved Newcastle had suffered their worst home FA Cup defeat in about ninety years, a humiliating 5-1 defeat to a lower division team, that I had to go and visit the city who had been responsible. Bastards.