Well after 10 years of being engaged to Jane, it’s about time we got around to marriage! The big day is 28 February 2009 and will take place at Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich with immediate family in attendance. There will be a bit of a gap until the honeymoon but we’ll be off to Vancouver, Canada for 12 days staying at the Fairmont Waterfront. Well, if it’s good enough for Her Britannic Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II then it’s good enough for us lol.

The lad is coming too as we’re hoping to emigrate to Vancouver as soon as we can and we’d all like to see the place first (he’ll perhaps spend a gap year with us - we’re not pressurising him). It would be great to line up a few interviews in advance as getting jobs is key to making the move initially. I’m hoping that a city of that size will have better opportunities for both of us than Ipswich. I’ve tried hard in London but the salary to support commuting is beyond what employers will pay for me - and we couldn’t afford to live there. Jane is an analytical chemist (as opposed to a pharmacy chemist that most people think of first) so with luck perhaps she can score a chemicals / pharmaceutical industry job. Will I continue working with the web? Currently my passion is being killed off as I work in isolation from skilled, dedicated designers and developers so I will keep an eye out on lab work too (as a technician) or apply to the local police department if that’s practical. I’m keeping a very open mind on what sort of work I can do. Working in a team environment where you feed off each other’s passion, skills and ideas is important to me, that’s why the current job grates so much.

We’re going for what I call a “lifestyle reset”. Downsize the home so we can live outside more - as a keen (12 years +) snowboarder and mountain biker the mountains and forests surrounding Vancouver are the clinchers for us over other Canadian cities. We’ll see. Now I’m older I’ll probably hurt myself quicker lol (I can count 17 concussions in the first 30 years of my life).

So, if you’re reading this from Vancouver and you think you might be able to help then please drop me a line I can be an older intern, no problem.

The aim of the conference is to break down the barriers between disabled users and the social web as much as giving ethical hackers real world issues to solve. We talked about improving the accessibility of the web for a long time - let’s not wait, let’s make it happen.

The first Scripting Enabled conference took place last weekend and true to its ethos there are slides available (video soon) to inspire everyone to solve real-world problems.

To keep the momentum up on a great concept, Christian Heilmann sets out a few ground rules to host your own event.

I’m giving micro-blogging (if that’s the right term) a go at Tumblr if you want to follow there. Why they can’t use semantic markup is beyond me, but nonetheless I like the theme I’ve selected. It aggregates my Twitter, del.icio.us and Google reader links as well as anything else I care to throw out there so it’s not all web development (but possibly still 100% geek).

Update: I’ve since found out I can change the markup and stuff… tempting.