Rules of the seven things meme

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Seven things

1. When I was a student in Beijing I worked part-time doing voice overs on a video that accompanied an English text book. A couple of years later, when I was teaching in a primary school in Ningbo southern China, I found myself being forced to  use the same video when teaching. Painful, seriously painful. My not so illustrious career in teaching ended soon after that when I moved to Shanghai and started working for a Chinese search engine.
2. Reality TV is like crack cocaine to me. One episode of anything and I’m hooked.
3. My friend Neil’s one and a half year old son Sam was paralysed in a car accident three years ago. I went dog sledding in the Arctic to raise money for him and together with friends we started fund raising on a permanent basis. Thanks to the help of hundreds of people we have raised 30K to help the family buy life changing equipment. Sam’s doing well and we’re focusing his website on spinal research now, but swing by and say Hi Sam, he’d like that.
4. I’m a complete snob about noodles. I’d rather gnaw off my right arm than eat somewhere like China Tang. Give me street food any day.
5. I’m very good at keeping other people’s secrets, but some secrets are a huge burden to carry.
6. I once got stuck in non-man’s land when crossing the border betwen Vietnam and China on foot because my visa’s were not correct. That’s when I learnt that in incrediably bad situations I tend not to panic. I save that for the small unimportant things instead.
7. I have a geek crush on Stephan Fry and Sir Tim Berners-Lee (there, I’ve said it now). Gentleman, if ever you want to come over for dinner you are more than welcome.

Seven people

1. Lisa Herrod – my wonderful co-lead of WaSP International Liason Group
2. Victor Tsaran – musician and accessibility genius at Yahoo!
3. Realazy – fighting on the front lines of web standards in China.
4. Zibin Cheah – fellow Opera evangelist fixing the web in Asia.
5. Richard Ishida – the internationalisation king.
6. Glenda Sims – the Goodwitch, ’nuff said.
7. Stephen Fry – twitterer and geek and essential to my not breaking my Chinese New Year resolutions.

We’ll be stepping up to the table to replace Glenda Sims aka Glenda the Goodwitch and Steph Troeth (a tough double act to follow if ever there was one) who have done an amazing job creating a dynamic group of international web standards advocates. Glenda is moving on to be a WaSP co lead while Steph is getting more involved in the Education Task Force who are doing amazing work on the Curriculum Project . Glenda and Steph – you’ll be missed!

To give you some background ILG is an international collective of web professionals promoting the global use of standards to ensure an equitable Web. objectives of the group are:

• Discuss with and inform the public about Web standards and accessibility issues as they relate to the practices and laws within particular countries and/or regions
• Publish multilingual educational information
• Provide resources about Web standards through such outreach as blogs, books, articles, presentations, code, design, vision and leadership
• Internationalize relevant documents and resources for the public use
• Encourage and invigorate international discussion about the Web
• Study how the Web is and will be used in a global context

For translations of these objectives visit the translations of ILG goals and objectives page.

Having worked in the group for over a year now I’ve been lucky enough to get to know many of the fifty plus members who are located all over the world. They’re an impressive bunch of people and I can’t wait to get more involved. Come September I’ll be travelling more; attending conferences and on tours, and I hope to meet more folks, not just from ILG but involved in web standards everywhere, in person and learn more about what is going on in various countries and regions.

For a two and a half years myself and some friends have been fundraising for a 3 year old friend called Sam who was severely disabled after a car crash. So far, with the £21,o000 raised, we’ve been able to buy him a specially adapted wheelchair so he can get out and about, an FES exercise bike to help him develop his muscles and immunity, and arm extensions so he can take part in the art classes he loves at playgroup.

My journey into Second Life has been inspired by Sam. While I was initially looking to fundraise and raise awareness , I then started to explore it’s technical accessibility and how it works with access technologies. During my travels I’ve met and gathered stories from residents in Second Life, people otherwise restricted in real life, who have found a whole new channel for expressing themselves. What has impressed me is the level of independence people have felt that goes beyond what an adapted wheelchair or arm extensions can do; if you’re able to access virtual worlds you can independently meet and make friends, go to concerts, nightclubs, classes and generally hang out. What has been most revealing of all however is how those of us who are able bodied can find it more comfortable to meet, communicate and talk frankly to people who are disabled through the protective layer of virtual reality. A level playing field in more ways than one.

I’ve started a Stuff4Sam group in Second Life to help raise awareness and hopefully raise funds for Sam. We’re also looking at how we can make Second Life more accessible to people with disabilities. It’s an open group and I would love for you to come and join us, spread the world and look into technical solutions for making Second Life accessible. Just search for “stuff4sam” in the Groups section of the Search and we’ll pop up – the more the better!

I spoke to her briefly this evening after she texted me to ask for the area code for Gloucester, of all things. Turned out a journalist from BBC Radio Gloucester left a message on her mobile asking her to phone back to do a short interview, but only left the end bit of his/her phone number! They plan to run the piece in their news bulletins tomorrow morning. Not to be missed! And they plan to do another interview tomorrow evening. So worth listening in again on Wednesday morning too. Assuming she’s still able to get a signal on the phone. Come to think of it, how come she can get a good signal in the snowy emptiness of northern Norway, and I can’t get a decent signal west of Reading?! Hmph!

When I spoke to her, she’d just spent an hour and a half preparing reindeer meat soup and chunks of frozen reindeer meat for her team of huskies – I doubt she’ll be spending as long getting her own food ready…