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

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!

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.

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!

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.

by 2MuchC0ffeeMan
If we could only charge our grandmothers for every time we fixed their cord not being plugged in…

by delfstrom
>If we could only charge our grandmothers for every time we fixed their cord not being plugged in…

I didn’t know grandmothers required electricity.

by Mr. Bad Example
> I didn’t know grandmothers required electricity.

This is obviously an early example of nanatechnology.

Oy… I need to go home.

Just figured I’d post about my conformance to more geek customs. I’ve been using bloglines for quite a while now, and have been loving it. I save time in not checking my normal sites every day to see no new content, but now loose time in that I have added another 50+ sites to my Bloglines list. The only reason it’s only 50+ is that I’m trying to be semi-conservative. I’m sure I could add hundreds but I would have no life other then checking things on it.

I absolutely love being able to get information so easliy. I get to sound so much more intelligent (then I actually am) when I am always talking about what I read the other day on dozens of subjects.

Just a week or so ago I decided to hop on to the del.icio.us bandwagon. It’s so much easier to post things there then to always be sending out links to friends about the latest cool site I ran into. So my delicious list slowly begins to grow as I go back to old posts to get them added.

Anyway… two cool geek things that I’m participating in that I wanted to make sure the 4 people that check my site once a month know about.

Eric Meyer writes the exact article that I wanted to, and says what I was thinking. Loud and boisterous kudos should be given for the steps taken. Yes we can quitely point to things that may have been missed, but it should not be held over their heads as wrong doings.

Sprint is often given praise as an example of a big company doing great things with CSS and XHTML, and for that we are appreciative. But our homepage, and the recent business section release aside, a large section of our site does not validate. That’s not through lack of trying or desire, but the existing structure of our Content Maintenance System, doesn’t allow us the full control that we would like to ahceive validation. While the higher ups have drunk from the standards kool-aid, they weren’t willing to put in the extra time and money it would take to do a bottom up overhaul of the engine driving our site. Especially since they already spend untold amounts of money getting it in place as it is.

With that in mind, I have no idea what hurdles Microsoft had to overcome to even get as far as they did. Maybe the remaining issues are ones that they have no choice but to leave for now and will address at a later time, just as we hope to do at Sprint. But they decided to get the best they could out the door as a sign of good faith or of things to come.

So once again, kudos to Microsoft for the great step forward they have made. May it continue to permeate into the rest of their site, and may they find a way past their current “small” issues soon.

So two days before the concert I decided to see what tickets were left, and for some odd reason some prime tickets were available. So I went ahead and grabbed them.

Now let me take a moment to express my pure distain for buying tickets from ticketmaster (they don’t deserve a link). The tickets were $38 a seat (which isn’t my issue), but there was an $8 “convenience” charge for EACH TICKET!!! What the heck is that all about? We called the place they were playing to see if we could come down and buy the tickets there, but they said the same $8 per ticket charge would apply. So if we didn’t use the “convenient” way to buy the tickets we still had to pay the convenience fee. What a joke! Then to add insult to injury, there was another $4.something processing charge. If you are going to give me this rediculous charge at least do me the decency of masking it, and just make the tickets be $46 each. Highway robbery at it’s finest…

Anyway… we got to the theater an hour early or so and it was a PERFECT evening. 72 or so degrees and just a slight breeze. Our tickets were dead center and 20 or so rows back… pretty sweet. Some comedian comes out and makes fun of various things around KC (the plaza, the triangle, Sprint, etc) and actually made me chuckle a few times (I don’t laugh easily).

Finally the show starts. This was only my 3-4 “professional” concert, and my first time seing Weird Al. He put on a great show, and was easily my favorite out of the shows I had seen. When I started thinking about it, I know more of his songs then probably any other artist. I guess this was an extension of his Poodle Hat tour so he played several songs from that album. Several of them I didn’t know either the parody or the original song… guess I’m getting out of touch.

But he did do some classics… All about the Pentiums, Horoscope (which I proudly know the long fast part in the middle), The Saga Begins (Star Wars I one), Yoda, Amish Paradise, I was Only Kidding, a compelation set or two, and several others I of course forgot.

We had a total blast and are going to make sure to get tickets early next time he comes. A highly recommended show from a great artist.

I don’t drink or smoke, but I’ve hear how bad that stuff makes people feel as well. Mix all of the above into one experince and I have no idea how you could subject your body to that on a regular basis. It was quite painful for one night, I just can’t imagine doing it over and over.

As per the band themselves… the music sounded very tight, at least when it wasn’t so overpowering that I couldn’t actualy discern one thing from another. I know it’s just my own opinion, but music is not enjoyable at that volume. When I focused on each individual instrument, I could hear (again, on occasion) some real quality. It’s just a shame that for me it was 95% “too much of a good thing” for me. I think I understood 10-15 words out of the entire set that they played so that begs the question… why even write lyrics if they can’t be understood? Anyway… they took 2nd place, much to the dismay of the crowd who were largely their loyal followers.

24 hours later my ears are still ringing and have a constant ache. Can it really be… that… I’m getting too old for this stuff?? *sigh*