Thanks to the event sponsors CSW - and particularly to Kerry and Laurie - for the chance to speak at the annual gathering of the many tribes of the XML Nation.

I address you with some foreboding, as word has reached me of the terrible things that have happened to speakers in past years, whose presentations have gone badly. Many tales, some perhaps apocryphal, reach me of speakers being chased out of the presentation room. Some are even worse: the errant speaker is caught. The body stripped bare. The head put on a spike. And as a final humiliation: the cadaver is tattooed with XML Schema.

Is this true? I'm not taking any chances. So in addition to rehearsing my presentation, I've also been rehearsing the 400 meter dash.

I live in California and write for The Register, which was ten years old last Sunday. We like to think that The Register, which is the world's only independent technology news site, is the scourge of Stupid things everywhere. And that's what I want to talk about.

Why things are Stupid and how we can make them less Stupid.

Before we get to the uplifting Hollywood ending, we'll plumb such low depths of Stupid - and I promise you, this really gets very subterranean - that you'll probably wonder what I'm doing here. It might look like I'm picking on you. Or at least picking on people like you, or your friends.

But I'm not. Last night in a couple of hours I learned more about software than I have from five years reading the trade press.

More importantly, there is hardly a Stupid thing here that I haven't thought myself. And I've lived to tell the tale. At least so far.