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This is kind of a weird post to start up with after almost a year of silence, but I guess you have to start somewhere.

So here I sit at SXSW. I was all kinds of excited to come after having some great experiences last year. The best being seeing Kathy Sierra talk on Creating Passionate Users, which completely changed my outlook on just about everything.

This year… it seems to be rather blah. Let me step through it…

Saturday

• A Decade of Style
  This is where I really started thinking that I hate the moderated panels. One person asks seemingly random questions, and the rest answer. Questions such as “when did you first encounter CSS”, “why did you stick with it”. How in the heck does this help educate me? What am I really suppposed to learn and take away from such questions? This panel did get to a little bit of good questions at the end like where should we be going, what advances need to be made… but it was too little too late to save the panel for me.
• After the Brief: A field Guide to Design Inspiration
  Good stuff. Well thought out presentation that explained where they (Jason Santa Maria and Rob Weychert) go to get their inspiration. Ideas on what I can do to get myself out of the box and come up with new things. Yes!! Teach me!! Get away from the computer… do things manually… do it differently then you normally would. Bring it!!
• Kathy Sierra Opening Remarks
  Love Kathy Sierra. This year wasn’t as ground breaking as last year was for me. She did focus in more on a specific subject (making a better help section for users) then the general “creating passionate users” from last year, but it still had a lot of great nuggets. In a nutshell… users going to the help aren’t the happy people we may be targeting. They are frustrated, angry people. So make a section that will address these users needs, not the guy who is just curious about what is going on.
• Grids are Good and How to Design with Them
  So so. The logic on how to come up with a grid based on a fixed requirement (in this case the dimensions of an advertisement) was good. Some of the stuff they did with the grid was good. Well prepared, but just not super engaging for me.
• Ruining the User Experience: When JavaScript and Ajax Go Bad
  Pretty good… for a 101 level chat. This is the panel that made some of us think that they need to have a classification system for each class. Is it a beginner, intermediate or advanced class on the given subject. The descriptions of what will be discussed can be interpreted many different ways. This one did what it said, but at a semi-superficial level. It seems that most classes here are beginner level, which does fit probably 90% of the participants. I just wish I stopped getting sucked into a cool topic, only to find that I’m not going to learn anything new on it.
• Mapping: Where the F#*% Are We Now?
  No where close to what I thought it would be. Talked about pie in the sky communication of GPS with Bluetooth and other oddities. So this is the inverse of the above, that I needed to know it was way above my level… and wasn’t going to tell me what I could do cool today. I bailed early on this one, as my eyes were glazing over.

Anyway… that was just the first day. I’m on day 3 now and the same pattern follows… moderated panels can actually suck the life from you. Classes are largely “nerfed” for the majority.

But the people… what about the people?

So SXSW is also supposed to be about the networking. All these A-listers are here, and by all accounts are very approachable. I just don’t know what we’d talk about. Last year I said hey to Shaun Inman, and asked how Mint was going, since I didn’t really know what else to ask. I could see the sigh in his body language, and kidded him about that being the question everyone must ask him about. It’s not them it’s me… I guess I just don’t do the social thing.

So that, on top of the being one of the 25 Mormons here (18 being from our group) and not having a strong desire to go to parties and watch people get drunk… makes the social aspect kind of lame for me.

That being said, I have been having a good time with my group at various meals and just meandering around. We had a blast last night as we set up our own theater and watched Nacho Libre and laughed our heads off. So building a comrodery with the team has definitely been nice.
Hopefully I’ll post more info soon and this will break my silence. I keep wanting to post but never want my lame thought to be the first thing I say. That issue is over and now I can post freely

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When playing the fun new game Fastr with a few friends it was difficult to see where they were in the rankings with it being so popular (100+ people in the game at a time). So I wanted a way to easily see where they were.

So, here’s a super quick and dirty bookmarklet for tracking friends while playing. This is like 30 mins of work and far from complete and perfect I’m sure. It’s also based on the current DOM of the page, so if that changes, this breaks. But since it’s centrally hosted I can compensate if that happens and the next time you use it after I fix it, it will work.

To use it, drag the following link to your toolbar, and then click that button after starting a game of Fastr. FastrFriends. After it’s loaded up, simply click a name to follow it, and click it again to stop following it (if you got the wrong one or whatever).

Potential upgrades I’m pondering:

• Option to show/hide all users that aren’t your friends
• Different colors depending on how high on the list they are
• Track their score and then show what they got on the last guess when it changes.

I know it works in FF 1.5 and IE 6. I’ve been told it doesn’t work in Safari but I don’t have easy access to that, so if anyone can tell me what to fix I will give it a try. Otherwise I will try and get a hold of one at work on Monday.

Report any bugs here… and enjoy!

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In continuing to play with the site (and in anticipation of a few actual articles actually being written) I have installed ShortStat, from the man himself Shaun Inman, so that I get all the spiffy info that comes with it.

My version is located here for all to poke fun at. As usual I couldn’t leave well enough alone and had to fiddle with it a little bit.

In setting it up I noticed I was the only one registering any hits. This is totally understandable as no one visits this site, but that aside, I hated seeing myself inflating the numbers. So I added a new paramater to the configuration.php file that is an array of IP’s that should be ignored. Then in the inc.stats.php file I added a check to see if the current IP was in that array. If not, then it would continue on it’s merry way. If it was, it would skip all the stat taking parts and it would be as if I was never there **queue tumbleweed**.

After testing this for a while I’ll let Shaun know about the concept so he can decide to add it to the actual program or not. Then again, last time I waited to write Shaun about something, he found out about it before I even had the chance to tell him. Sneaky little devil.

Update
After looking at my stats the next morning I was amazed to see 54 or so visitors. I thought that there is no way this could be, and so on further inspection all but like 3 of them were Search Bots, and RSS Aggregators. So I added two more options to the script. Variables to turn tracking of those two things on and off.

countBots – lets Short Stat do it’s normal checks on the User Agent. If it is returned as “Crawler/Search Engine” and this variable is “false”, then the insert doesn’t occur.
countFeeds – If the $res variable has “/feed/” in it (working through a WordPress install, so this won’t be globally true) and this variable is false, then the insert doesn’t occur.

Will continue to add any edits I make, and how things go after they run for awhile.

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Finally made the move to WordPress 1.5. Upgrade went pretty smooth except for a little hiccup with the .htaccess file which made the whole domain show up as a 500 error. Renamed the old one and put in an empty one and all is good.

Installed the del.icio.us integrator plugin which also went extremely smooth.

Will probably be stuck with the default template for a while as life is fairly busy at the moment. On that note, I hope to actually make a few posts in the near future. One or two to explain why I’m busy, and a few more of some projects I’ve been working on.

Until then… TTFN!

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I’ve finally seen some footage of the devastation caused by the tsunami and it’s just incredible. The forces of nature never cease to amaze me.

Kirk over at Reasons Unbeknownst has created a torrent of some videos and other files related to the tsunami. He is creating another file with additional footage as well.

As of this writing there are “520 people downloading, 1437 seeders donating bandwidth.” That is a pretty good ratio of seeders to downloaders. One that I have never seen before. Most of us can’t do much for those who have been affected by this tragedy, but it seems that people are doing what they can by sharing their bandwidth so that others can get what information is out there.

In a recent update to the above article, Kirk added some humanitarian links that he got from apple.com. Below is a screengrab of what their site looks like at this moment. It’s a pretty big statement to dedicate your entire corporate homepage to linking to humanitarian and relief efforts. Major props to Apple for being so selfless at this time of grief for so many.

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