4/7 Living in the 80s
I went to see a movie about a decade that is so far in past that next year, kids who did not live in it will be able to buy beer.
3/21 SXSWi Recap
Once again, another South By Southwest Interactive is over, and for me the music fest as well. Overall, SXSWi was probably better than last year's, but let me stress that that isn't saying a whole lot.
The Good
The Good
- Jared Spool. Ever since Alex dragged me to one of his panels a few years ago, I have felt obligated to see the guy speak every year. He's entertaining, he's got a lot of numbers and research, and he draws conclusions that you can actually take home and use in your designs or business plans.
- My 3-year-old Is My Usability Expert. Initially I was skeptical, considering the standard "my wife/kid/mom/dog looked at your design and we have some feedback" thing. But this panel by University of Florida educator Dave Stanton made me want to take one of his classes. He rocked some science and brought the numbers, not to mention his case study: an eye-opening screencast of the titular 3-year-old playing online games focused at her age group.
- Chris Poole. The young 4chan founder actually has been devoting a decent amount of brain cycles to figuring out why the thing works, and his panel on how that can be applied to your site, web app, or campaign was really insightful.
- AOL's presence. While not something I can use to better myself and my work, the fact that AOL was such a large force at SXSW (the whole thing, not just interactive) was inspirational and exciting. The Seed booth was excellent, the response to the pitch (yes, our team did some pitching --who better?) was overwhelmingly positive, and I can't help but think AOL's image in the eyes of the tech-savvy is finally turning around. Not to mention we were able to attach some faces to those voices on the phone.
The Bad
- Commercials. When I go to a panel about prototyping, I neither expect nor want what amounts to a commercial for your favorite wireframing tool. Were you paid by them? Likewise, for four years now there has been at least one Drupal advertisement panel disguised as an intriguing look at website CMSs.
- Surface scraping. I realize some talks are not that long and don't have time to go into great detail, but if I feel like you've glossed over everything rather than really getting to the bones of it, you should maybe narrow your topic. After seeing Spool and Stanton, I felt even more dismayed by the lack of meat on these presentational bones. I want giant data dumps that I'll be thinking about for weeks to come, not overviews of single chapters in books I've already read. And I definitely don't want to see people just showing off their work while lamely "umm"-ing their way through explaining absolutely nothing about how it applies to me or my own work.
- Overcrowding. Apparently somewhere around 12,000 attendees registered this year, the first time interactive badge sales outstripped music ones. The conference has spilled into the Hilton, the Marriott, and the Radisson, but that really isn't the problem. The problem seems to be that no one quite knows how to estimate which panels will be popular. Giant ballrooms sit relatively empty while small meeting rooms spill out into the hallways, letting one in as one comes out.
- The iPhone app. Constant reloading, resetting to the first day, no panelist names in descriptions, inability to list events by venue... it was much tougher to get around using the iPhone app than the mobile-friendly site of last year.
Like I said, overall it was a better experience than last year's, but I think I'm even more solidified in my plans to do a panel next year...
3/18 RIP Alex Chilton
SXSW recaps coming, but for now...
An earlier follower of theirs, Cheap Trick, brought "In The Street" back when they covered it as the theme song to "That 70s Show."
Here's Alex Chilton with his first band, the Box Tops. Even your mom knows this song:
And here's one of those cheesy YouTube slide shows of my favorite Big Star song, "The Ballad of El Goodo"
Alex Chilton, the influential musician and producer who worked first with The Box Tops and then with the power pop group Big Star, died this week from a heart attack at age 59.Chilton is somebody who has really started to influence me in a huge way as I've started to play more pop-oriented, "accessible" music. Big Star were an anachronism when they came out, a Beatles/Byrds-influenced shiny pop group in the early '70s heyday of heavy metal. They enjoyed few record sales, and an interview recorded after their second album finds Chilton calling their first one "rare" and hard to find. But their sound looked as much to the future as the past, and by the 1980s bands like R.E.M. and the Replacements were making a solid living with a jangly Big-Star-influenced sound.
An earlier follower of theirs, Cheap Trick, brought "In The Street" back when they covered it as the theme song to "That 70s Show."
Here's Alex Chilton with his first band, the Box Tops. Even your mom knows this song:
And here's one of those cheesy YouTube slide shows of my favorite Big Star song, "The Ballad of El Goodo"
1/20 What I did on my blog's vacation, part 9 of 3
I've been out of it for quite some time, so I thought I'd update on some of the wonderful things that I did during those dark, dark days. People who know what I work on probably have a pretty good idea of where most of that time went (plantin' seeds, yaknow), but it wasn't all Gavin-directed slave driving.
For one, I bought a snappy little netbook. They're quite the thing; all the kids seem to have one. And these days, they're sturdily built, powerful machines for their size. They can run Windows XP and MS Office, and have great multimedia capability.
Unfortunately, mine is not a product of these days.
The eeePC 900 is Asus's first netbook, and one of the first ever. It comes with a 4GB solid state drive but is otherwise spec'd out pretty much like a tiny, cheap plastic hybrid of a Speak & Spell and a Commodore 64. If only the keyboard were as big as the Speak & Spell's.
Actually, with a little gumption you can turn an older model eeePC into a nice little portable. The screen is great, the battery life is decent, and the multi-touch trackpad is pretty nice. First step is to kill the stock OS, which is a customized version of Xandros. That piece of crap choked on even the tiniest videos and web pages. I wonder how these things sold at all. It certainly doesn't do Linux advocacy any favors. So I searched around for a while until I found that some guys had made a eee-specific version of Ubuntu called (not so cleverly) eeebuntu that really whips this thing into shape.
Using the eeebuntu base install and throwing a few extra programs on, I was able to make this thing into a usable machine for browsing with Chrome, writing documents using AbiWord, reading ebooks by rotating the screen, and even watching fairly high-res video on MPlayer. With the 10.1 beta of Flash, little toy netbook processors can now hang in there with YouTube and (on a good day) Hulu. After the OS is in place, you can start upgrading the RAM and SSD and you have a decent machine.
I got the little doodad on Woot for a buck fifty, otherwise I probably wouldn't have it at all (somehow once I hit $200 I expect "real computer" specs), but it seems like they must have sold out stock because they've moved on to the slightly pricier XP-powered Acer Aspires. But if you do find one cheap and you're looking to play around a little, the eeePC 900 is a fun little slice of computer.
For one, I bought a snappy little netbook. They're quite the thing; all the kids seem to have one. And these days, they're sturdily built, powerful machines for their size. They can run Windows XP and MS Office, and have great multimedia capability.
Unfortunately, mine is not a product of these days.
The eeePC 900 is Asus's first netbook, and one of the first ever. It comes with a 4GB solid state drive but is otherwise spec'd out pretty much like a tiny, cheap plastic hybrid of a Speak & Spell and a Commodore 64. If only the keyboard were as big as the Speak & Spell's.
Actually, with a little gumption you can turn an older model eeePC into a nice little portable. The screen is great, the battery life is decent, and the multi-touch trackpad is pretty nice. First step is to kill the stock OS, which is a customized version of Xandros. That piece of crap choked on even the tiniest videos and web pages. I wonder how these things sold at all. It certainly doesn't do Linux advocacy any favors. So I searched around for a while until I found that some guys had made a eee-specific version of Ubuntu called (not so cleverly) eeebuntu that really whips this thing into shape.
Using the eeebuntu base install and throwing a few extra programs on, I was able to make this thing into a usable machine for browsing with Chrome, writing documents using AbiWord, reading ebooks by rotating the screen, and even watching fairly high-res video on MPlayer. With the 10.1 beta of Flash, little toy netbook processors can now hang in there with YouTube and (on a good day) Hulu. After the OS is in place, you can start upgrading the RAM and SSD and you have a decent machine.
I got the little doodad on Woot for a buck fifty, otherwise I probably wouldn't have it at all (somehow once I hit $200 I expect "real computer" specs), but it seems like they must have sold out stock because they've moved on to the slightly pricier XP-powered Acer Aspires. But if you do find one cheap and you're looking to play around a little, the eeePC 900 is a fun little slice of computer.