SxSWi Day 2 – Asynchronous Attendence

March 13th, 2010

As always, there are more panels I want to see than is possible, unless I can clone myself.  After being shut out of a extremely popular panel and following it on Twittter, it occurred to me that I can attend my first choice (or second if the first is full) in person (synchronously) and the others asynchronously on Twitter, YouTube, etc.

SxSWi Day 2 – Hang on to a Good Seat

March 13th, 2010

I planned on attending three panels in a row in the same room.  The first was nearly full, the second may be 2/3 full. So I went out in the hall to charge the laptop’s battery.  Bad plan, the line to get back in goes down the block and around the corner.  I’ll be attending asynchronously (see next post).

SxSWi Day 2 – The Right Way to Wireframe, Parts 1 & 2

March 13th, 2010

Awesome pair of panels – 1 client (a non-profit) and 4 designer’s design process and solutions.  Showing the intermediate steps, work products, etc.  Informative, fun, enlightening, and entertaining.  The first two presenters clearly had presented or worked together and had an engaging tag team style.  The other two didn’t work as well together, but they were fine by themselves.

Any one would have been good, all four was fantastic.  Look on YouTube for “Right Way to Wireframe” to catch their time lapse videos.

SxSWi Day 1

March 12th, 2010

As they say, “It opened to mixed reviews.”  The first session I attended, Beauty in Web Design, was full.  I was willing to climb over a dozen feet to get a seat, but there were many more people standing than empty seats.  Good, though high level, review of beauty and design philosophy.  The most memorable line, “Where are the Website masterpieces.”

My second session, What Are Analytics? A Guide To Practical Data, had a waiting line that I escaped by not realizing that it was there and walking in through the other door.  It didn’t say anywhere it was about Social Media (SM), but it was largely about tracking the presence and sentiment about a company in the SM.  I was expecting a talk on how to make sense of the data in Google Analytics (GA).  Near the end of the talk there was a brief mention of GA.

Because I wasn’t real interested in the talk, I finally started using my Twitter account (@AustinBlues) that I’ve had since last SxSWi.  Threw a few tweets into the Tweetstream and had the ego boost of seeing one re-tweeted.  This practice was good preparation for the next session.

The last session of the day, Simple Steps to Great Web Design, was back at the room where I attended the first talk, there was a line that I couldn’t ignore.  When it became obvious that I wasn’t going to be able to get in, I found a talk with a power outlet and tried to follow the talk on the Twitter (#simplestepsgreatdesign). Not ideal, but picked up some useable information.

Unfortunately, there was a fire alarm and the Convention Center  was evacuated.  I was tired and called my wife to pick me up.  The alarm was false and the talk did resume with some empty seats.  Sorry I missed it, appears to have been a very good talk.

SxSWi 2010 – Day 0 or Maybe -1

March 11th, 2010

I walked over the Austin Convention Center to pick up my badge.  The line was 40 minutes long by that point.  After filling in the green registration card and presenting my photo ID, the volunteer handed me back the green card and I went to the holding area to wait for my badge to be printed.  And waited. And waited.  And noticed that the green registration cards were being handed to runners to the back office.

So I checked with the volunteer, she apologized, and requested a rush order.  Back to holding area to wait and wait.  After several people I knew came after me received their badges I checked again.  My badge had gone missing!  So over to the help desk where someone walked the new registration card through by hand.  Finally after an hour and half, I had my badge.  With last year’s dreadful photo.  It was done with a Web cam mounted down on the registration desk, giving a distorted, cheap horror movie look.

My wife and I spent over half an hour yesterday taking pictures outdoors (reflection of the sky on my glasses), indoor (reflection of the flash), and in an outdoor shaded breezeway (odd color from the bricks giving a three day bender look).  I uploaded it okay and it is on my my.sxsw.com page, but not on my badge.

Not off to a very promising start.  And Kathy Sierra is not presenting this year.  Apparently, stalkers again.  She was on Twitter briefly, but the RSS feed of her tweets is blocked.  Bummer.

Old Bad Guy, New Suit

December 19th, 2009

My laptop has been getting occasional disk errors when doing backups lately.  This is not good! I don’t really want to have to buy a new laptop.  However, an old memory finally surfaced.

Several years ago, I upgraded the hard drive on a desktop.  It was bigger, faster, and required the new 80 wire cables.  However, it kept throwing “Media Check Failed” errors.  I googled, asked questions, pulled my hair.  Finally someone enlightened me, media checks are checksums on blocks of data transferred from the disk controller.  Failing media checks are usually caused by bad cables.  Replacing the $10 UDMA-100 cable with a $40 one from a major manufacturer solved the problem.

I finally noticed that the current setup is throwing media check failed errors.  The backup disk is an external USB hard drive.  It is plugged into a USB hub.  And it is fast, faster than the built-in hard drive!  Just maybe, the USB hub is fine for mice and printers, but maybe, just maybe, marginal with a very fast hard drive.

For the past week, I’ve plugged the hard drive directly into the laptop and there have been no errors.  It looks like I’ve found the bad guy, even disguised in new clothes ;)

SXSWi: UX Team of One

March 15th, 2009

UX = User eXperience. Very good presentation on dubious proposition (IMHO of course). Or maybe not. How to be and manage user experience part of a project, probably but not necessarily a Website. “Design the box” is an interesting exercise even for products/projects that won’t ship in a box.

Links: slides and followup.

SXSWi: Christina Wodtke – Social Architecture

March 14th, 2009

Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web was another “book reading” but she spent almost all of her time presenting solid information with just a mention at the end of her book and where to buy it (Barnes & Noble at the Trade Show). Very nice contrast to the two presentations yesterday — same place, same channel, different result.

SXSWi: Co-Working

March 14th, 2009

Informative session on co-working, shared workspaces: coffeehouse groups, incubators, labs, studio spaces, etc.  One thing that came up repeatedly is people looking for the business model.  A very useful model I found for many things is a metaphor from Fritz Lieber’s sword and sorcery fantasy series.  In the main city there is a street that runs from a city gate all the way to the main temple at the center of the city.  Someone comes in from the desert with a vision and begins preaching.  If he/she attracts a crowd he/she stays and expands the vision and the crowd/congregation.  If not, back to the desert for a better vision.  Congregations and the preacher may expand until they move into a building.  There is continual movement of congregations moving up and down the street as their size/wealth/etc. increase and decrease.

I’ve found this a useful business model, a fine grained spectrum of niches.  None of the “You Must Be This Tall For This Ride”.  In Austin, someone may start selling tamales out of their truck, progress to a taco trailer where you can touch all four walls without moving, then a taco truck, a bigger taco truck, then a permanent location while building a restaurant on the other end of the property.  One big stumbling block is downsizing as gracefully.

If tacos are your thing, BBQ.  Start selling the meat and meals out of the back of a truck, then a BBQ pit on a trailer, etc.

SXSWi Book Readings on the Day Stage

March 13th, 2009

Both of the book readings were content-lite, mostly reciting their media appearences. I’ve saved the URLs, maybe there’s something there but I wasn’t intrigued by the presentation. Of course, both of these are print authors, not tech presenters like the other sessions.