Category: austin

I had a great time at SXSW and I was able to take a bunch more pictures. I’ve finished processing those and I’ve posted those photos on Flickr. For those who may be curious, I took 43 photos, chose to process 20 of those, and posted 8 shots.

For what it’s worth, I made use of raw mode this time (well, RAW + JPEG Fine) and I my shots seemed to have a better resistance to having their highlights getting blown out (a reoccurring problem that I was running into as I was taking shots during my trip to South Africa in February). Then again, the lighting was almost completely different between those shots and these; in South Africa, I was mostly dealing with either bright sunlight or incandescent light, while in Austin I mostly had cloudy days (not that I'm complaining — cloudy days can be very handy for their diffuse light!).

Standard photo-entry text: All my photos are released under a Creative Commons license which roughly states that you’re free to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”. One exception, however, is this shot of the Q & A session after Helvetica — Andrew Dupont was trying my camera to get a feel for it; that’s one of his shots and he mentioned to me ahead of time that he’d like to place that under CC-Attribution license.

It’s early March and that can only mean that it's time for SXSW, a multi-part film / music / interactive festival. I’m only going for the interactive part, myself, which focuses on design, web coding, and such. Anyhow, if you’ll be down in Austin, here’re some of the panels I’ll be going to:

Saturday

• 10:00 am — A Decade of Style (with Eric Meyer and Doug Bowman)
• 3:30 pm — Stop Designing Products (with Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path)
• 4:05 pm - Ruining the User Experience: When JavaScript and Ajax Go Bad
• 5:00 pm — From Tags to Riches: Life After Code

Sunday

• 10:00 am — Accessibility Wars: A Report From the Trenches (with Sharron Rush of Knowbility)
• 2:00 pm — Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Mobile Web…but Were Afraid to Ask
• 3:30 pm — Accessified! Practical Accessibility Fixes Any Web Developer Can Use (with Ian Lloyd of accessify.com)
• 4:05 pm — The Future of JavaScript (with Andrew Dupont)

Monday

• 10:00 am — Ajax Kung Fu Meets Accessibility Feng Shui (with Jeremy Keith and Derek Featherstone)
• 12:45 pm — The Weblog Awards, Trade Show Day Stage
• 2:00 pm — The Growth and Evolution of Microformats (with Tantek Çelik)
• 4:05 pm — Javascript: The Big Picture (with Peter-Paul Koch / ppk)
• 5:00 pm — WaSP Annual Meeting: Takin’ it to the Street

Tuesday

• 10:00 am — Browser Wars Retrospective: Past, Present and Future Battlefields (with Brendan Eich of Mozilla)
• 2:00 pm — Music From the Masses: The Remix Revolution
• 3:30 pm — How to Make Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Usability Work Together
• 5:00 pm — The Ultimate Music Recommendation Smackdown

It’s mid-March, and that can only mean one thing — it's time for another fun trip to Austin for SXSW 2005. For those not aware, South by Southwest (more commonly known by its initials, SXSW) is a music, film and interactive festival in Austin, Texas; I’ll be attending the Interactive conference.

The interactive conference runs this Friday through Tuesday (March 11th-16th) and their schedule of panels is online. Here’re some of the panels which I’ll be attending:

Saturday March 12th

• 2:00 pm — Opening Remarks: Jeffrey Zeldman. With all the useful links on Zeldman.com, his site is almost like a mini aggregator for the web coding world.

• 5:00 pm — How to Make Big Things Happen With Small Teams. I work at a small company and I thought I might be able to get something out of this. And it's presented by Jason Fried of 37signals, so it’s hard to go wrong.

• 6:00pm — WaSP/CSS-D/WD-L/WSM/AIR Meetup for SXSW Interactive. Hosted by James Craig, this could be a good opportunity to meet other standards-minded web coders.

Sunday March 13th

• 10:00 am — Emergent Semantics. It had “semantics” in its title and it’s presented by Eric Meyer. I needed no further convincing ;).

• 11:30 am — How to be Beautiful: More Hi-Fi Design With CSS. This panel also has some of the big names in CSS, including Doug Bowman, Dan Cederholm and Dave Shea.

• 2:00 pm — Keynote Speaker: Malcolm Gladwell. I’ve enjoyed Gladwell’s work ever since discovering his article on the Science of Shopping. In this keynote, he'll probably talk about his new book Blink, which I’ve also heard good things about.

• 3:30 pm — How to Use Accessiblity Guidelines, Standards and Testing. I try to stay current on web accessibility and this panel particularly interested me as it appears to focus on real world testing with (free) tools.

• 3:30 pm — The Elements of Meaningful XHTML. Yeah, so I have two Sunday-at-3:30 panels on my list. It's really hard to decide between these two as this one is also right up my alley. And, while I’ve been to panels where Tantek Celik spoke among other panelists, I haven't been to one where he spoke as the sole presenter.

• 5:00 pm — How to Build Your Brand with Blogs. The company I work for (RD2) also has a corporate blog and this seemed a useful panel to get the most out of that.

Monday March 14th

• 11:30 am — How to Inform Design: How to Set Your Pants on Fire. Jeffrey Veen is one of the panelists on this one and, even though I’m not an information architect, his panels which I went to last year were so engaging that I couldn’t resist going to this one as well.

• 3:30 pm — The Semantic Web: Promising Future or Utter Failure. This looks like it could be one of those debate-panels where experts discuss opposing sides of an issue — sometimes it works out while other times it falls flat. Here’s to hoping this one is lively and interesting.

• 5:00 pm — A Sample of Style from the Homestar Runner Folks. Homestar Runner is an amusing online Flash animation series which can only be made better by puppet versions of their characters (w00t!). Oh, and I’ve discovered that there’s also a Homestar Runner Wiki. Who knew?

Tuesday March 15th

• 11:30 am — Notes From the Underground: The Rise of Remix Culture. I get a kick out of mashups — an art form where someone superimposes one song on top of another to form a brand new song — and I’m looking forward to seeing what they cover in this panel.

• 2:30 pm — Accessibility Shoot-Out. In this panel, URLs are thrown into a hat and then accessibility experts look over the site and give advice. I’m concerned that I may not learn much new out of this one, but you never know.

So, those are the panels which I’ve penciled-in so far. SXSW is a great time every year and I can't wait to get to Austin!

Once again, I’m heading off to SXSW. I plan on leaving around lunchtime today (Friday) and driving back Tuesday evening (after the last panel of the day). In case you’re going also, here're some of the panels I plan on attending:

Saturday:

• Accessibility is for Everybody — a general web-accessibility panel[3:30 - 4:30]
• Web Navigation Without A Guide Dog — accessbility techniques with JavaScript, Flash and CSS [5:00 - 6:00]

Sunday:

• Virginia Postrel Presentation — she wrote The Substance of Style about the look-and-feel of people and places [10:00 - 11:00]
• Red Vs. Blue Case Study — Red vs Blue is an amusing set of animated shorts created with the Halo game engine [11:30 - 12:30]
• Wikwiki, What? — a Wiki is a collection of Web pages which can be edited by anyone [3:30 - 4:30]

Monday:

• Hi-Fi Design With CSS — with Doug Bowman [10:00 - 11:00]
• CSS: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly — with Tantek Çelik, Eric Meyer and and Doug Bowman [11:30 - 12:30]
• The Frontiers of User Experience — on information architecture and user interaction [3:30 - 4:30]

Tuesday:

• I haven’t yet decided on the panels for Tuesday.