I know most of you want ladies at conferences. Most of you are delighted when we show up. No more excuses conference organizers! There are loads of geeky women speakers, who would be delighted to share their technical expertise with your audience.

The quiet guy next to me at the bar glanced over a couple of times. He looked more like me, a business traveler getting his dinner, his laptop on the bar. The place got more and more crowded and somehow we began to speak. I suppose he started it. By the time our dinner arrived, he moved to the seat next to mine so we wouldn’t have to shout.

I probably should have been playing the tourist at the third street promenade, but I was still holding out hope that I would finish writing an article on background images for a series that Opera is putting together. More on that later. Anyway, this could be some clichéd story, but actually he and I had a really interesting conversation about a new culture that is arising out of essentially fitting nowhere.

Anyone that has lived abroad for more than a few years, understands fundamentally not fitting. When I moved to Paris, I expected it to be a culture shock, to really change my ideas. It’s natural, I had to learn the language, and more than that, figure out how to make my way in a culture with vastly different values and customs than my own. To my surprise then, the biggest not-fitting had nothing to do with my adopted culture, but rather the first time I returned home after truly becoming French somewhere deep in my core. It’s only then that you realize your instincts are off, you find odd those who share the culture you once considered as natural as water to a fish.

Dario confirmed that ultimately, when you’ve truly adopted another culture, you can never feel ordinary again. I will be an etranger for the rest of my life. I only feel French when I’m in the States, and I only feel American in Paris. I can only imagine what California is doing to my brain as we speak. In fact, just last night I casually told a group of people about buying a treadmill for my dog, without once thinking that this was a little eccentric.

I wrote about The Namesake, an excellent book about Indians moving to Cambridge for graduate school. When I read it, I wasn’t thinking about the cultural differences of the Indian family, I was empathizing with a situation that so closely resembled my own. These same stories echo in people from around the world. I know an Indian married to a Jewish American woman, living in Boston. I’m an American who married a Frenchman and we’ve lived in Boston, France, and the Silicon Valley. I work with a Bulgarian who has lived in Canada and California. I went to school with Algerians living in the banlieue. I have friends here who have American children though both parents are foreign (what does a word like foreign or international even mean anymore?). I sang with Brits living in Nairobi. And, on this night, I talked to a Spanish man living in New York.

These people, pioneers really, are comfortable everywhere, even as they fit perfectly nowhere. They’ll never have the luxury of believing that their home is perfect or being so firm in their ideas that they don’t even notice them. No matter where they settle, they’ll miss something, or someone, from everywhere they’ve ever lived. And each knows, that they can never truly go home again. In each place, they’ll only feel all the more strongly the parts of them that are drawn to another home. They’ll mix up languages and use words that don’t belong. For me it is dégradé, I simply cannot remember the word in English, at least not while speaking.

Similarly, I’ve come to believe everyone should have access to healthcare, an idea that is only beginning to be considered other than shockingly left wing, in my own country. For an Indian friend, the press of people in Bombay feels slightly overwhelming. Or a Frenchwoman, with her stroller stuck in the sand in Cannes, prefers American friendliness to French politesse. You might think that fitting nowhere is a lonely place to be, and you’d be right, it can be. But I’ve discovered that these multicultural people fit well with each other. No matter where they’ve come from, or moved to, it seems that the archetype of the immigrant is strong enough to bond them in a common un-culture. I enjoy the sense of humor that comes with personal understanding of just how transitory strongly held beliefs can be when you begin to look at them from the eyes of the other. When you begin to be other.

1. Flush the buffer early
2. Use GET for AJAX requests
3. Post-load components
4. Preload components
5. Reduce the number of DOM elements
6. Split components across domains
7. Minimize the number of iframes
8. No 404s
9. Reduce cookie size
10. Use cookie-free domains for components
11. Minimize DOM access
12. Develop smart event handlers
13. Choose <link> over @import
14. Avoid filters
15. Optimize images
16. Optimize CSS sprites
17. Don’t scale images in HTML
18. Make favicon.ico small and cacheable
19. Keep components under 25K [mobile]
20. Pack components into a multipart document

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Stay tuned, we’ve got more tricks up our sleeve.

Beware, if you like color, you could spend hours on this site.

Some inspiration, though I’m not lucky enough to call them mine:

Molded fiberglass shell chairs with a dowel base are a cool combination of space aged and earthy.

This test was very simple, and a little biased perhaps, because it was too easy to see how the responses related to the outcome.

Share your results:
98/100 - Visual
56/100 - Auditory
63/100 - Kinaesthetic

Share with others:

I am: 8/20 theoretic, 12/20 reflective, 8/20 pragmatic and 10/20 active! How about you?

Happy voting.

In fact it is in California, not so far from my house. En fait il se situe en Californie, pres de chez moi.

Somerville, pres de Boston, ou j’ai fait mes etudes est connu pour leurs fetes de lumiere de fin d’année. La maison avec les palmiers en lumiere est celle de mes amis Phi et Rachel.

En Californie ils ont tout a fait autant lumieres mais leurs maisons sont plus petite donc ca brille encore plus. You can visit the neighborhood using the Tour the Crazy Christmas Lights Map.

Best Red White and Blue that didn’t include a flag:

Best crazy use of lawn ornaments:

Best equal opportunity Jesus/Santa house:

They put my house to shame, but I do really like our Christmas tree. I would only say that they really look smaller on the lot than they do once they’re in your living room. Best to measure. Hugo is always right.