Mark Meeker

John Slatin was a highly respected accessibility advocate and University of Texas professor who died at the end of March after a courageous three year battle with leukemia. I never had a chance to meet him personally, but I have gained a great deal from many who considered him a colleague and a friend.

The John Slatin Fund Accessibility Project was established to help John’s wife Anna offset the tremendous medical expenses incurred during John’s long illness. The goal of this project is to raise $25,000 for that purpose.

From the site:

The John Slatin Fund Accessibility Project matches accessibility experts with companies that would like a brief review of their site for accessibility. In return, the site owner is asked to contribute a minimum of $500 to The John Slatin Fund. The John Slatin Fund was established to help John’s beloved Anna offset the medical expenses incurred during John’s long illness.

Along with others in the industry, I’ve volunteered my time to perform reviews. If you know of a company interested in a review point them to the sign up page.

A couple of months ago I presented a session on microformats at the Chicago office of Orbitz Worldwide. Some of my co-workers were kind enough to record it and make it available online.

The session is intended to introduce microformats and to offer up some examples of where and why they are currently being used.

I’ve also updated the slides to add some corrections and made them available for download.

A lot is usually said about the weather in Chicago. Most of it centers around the fact we get to experience a little bit of everything — from hot and humid summers to frigid cold winters. However, it is pretty rare to be able to experience both ends of the spectrum in a single day. During the course of a day the forecast is predicting a drop of more than 45 degrees. Gotta love it!

The weather forecast is predicting single digit temperatures around here by the end of the week. Luckily, on Wednesday I’m heading down to Florida to take part in The Spring Experience. My colleague, Michael Alford and I will be presenting on how Spring was leveraged in our next generation travel platform at Orbitz. I’ll be focusing on some of the challenges we faced at the UI layer and how we leveraged the Spring Framework to solve some of them.

From the conference agenda:

In this session, Michael Alford and Mark Meeker will describe the major business goals that drove the development of Orbitz Worldwide’s next generation online travel commerce platform, and how those goals were met with Spring and other technologies.

Last summer, Orbitz Worldwide released a new generation of its global technology platform with the goals of internationalization, white-label capability, and faster, streamlined development. Michael and Mark will describe the key challenges of this technology project and how those challenges were addressed, including the good, bad, and ugly of the Spring Framework and Spring Web Flow.

If you are going as well be sure to say hello.

Been busy, so I’m a little late in posting a re-cap. The US Open has ended with Federer and Henin taking the titles. Again this year I was lucky enough to spend time there during the first week of the tournament.

I did manage to have tickets to see the tennis in Aurthur Ashe Stadium where some of the greatest players of the game took the court. But, for me the best matches will always be found on the outer courts. This is where the not so big name players and even some soon to be stars can be seen trying to win their first or second round matches.

My favorite courts on the grounds will always be courts 14 and above — this is where “courtside” seats consist of couple of small metal bleachers which would feel at home at a high school and where the front row seat holders have the advantage of leaning up against the chain-link fence. You can’t get closer to the game than that.

The pictures I took have been added to my photo album. I hope to update this post later this week with the list of matches I got to see.