Full frontal nerdity

frontalnerdity
Originally uploaded by michael j nolan.

Here's why I love what I do for a living: I get to go to geekfests like SXSW and hang out with nerds. These nerds are brilliant, funny people who are shaping the world of the Web with their thinking and actions.

In this photo you'll see, from left to right, Curt Cloninger, author of Fresh Styles for Web Designers and a new book that promises to be very cool, Hot Wiring the Creative Process. Curt did a session here day before yesterday that was so popular people were sitting on the floor and lining the walls.

Next to Curt is Eric Meyer, the author of a couple of outstanding books on CSS (Cascading Style Sheets.) CSS is the right way designers use to make web pages look and work great. Besides being as smart as they come, Eric is funny too. It was him that coined the title of this post.

I'm standing next to Eric, and next to me is Charles Wyke-Smith, my long-time friend and also a New Riders author who's just finishing up his book on CSS called Stylin'.

The irrepressible Molly Holzschlag is next to Charles. Named "one of the twenty five most influential women on the Web," Molly has written 34 books in 8 years. Her latest, co-authored with Dave Shea, is The Zen of CSS.

Next to Molly is the brilliant designer Doug Bowman. He hasn't written a book yet, but everyone thinks he should.

It's hard to believe so many books about a subject such as CSS could sell, until you see all these geeks with their laptops, posting to their blogs and instant messaging people right while the sessions and panels are going on. This is a very tech-savvy crowd, and it represents the tip of the iceberg of the changes that are rocking our world.

And who would've thought that the oysters Rockefeller you could get in Austin Texas would be fabulous?