Blog Standard Stuff

Transparent Screen - peon.master,
originally uploaded by w00kie.

A crazy idea carried off perfectly …

Come to Durstan …

Note: not really a difficult to spot, but I just saw the smile. The smile, goddammit! Sorry Dunstan, I mean Durstan. Oh, and in case you’re wondering what the heck this is all about, here’s the skinny.

The first time I came to Austin, I found that I was desperately making notes through every presentation. The second year, I made fewer notes, but tried all the same, and tried to post updates as soon as I could. This year, I hardly took notes and found the experience has moved from being a learning-with-some-networking experience to a social-with-an-element-of-learning experience. As such, I found that the only time I was tapping away at the laptop was to chat (instant message) with others at the conference about lunch arrangements, evening socialising and also to chat with Manda back at home in England. So, my notes here are from memory, as chronological as I can make them. You never know, there might be some useful learning stuff in there, but I doubt it, heh!

• Friday
  • Like most other people, most of Friday was tied up with travelling (from the UK, via a coach journey and a couple of flights). As soon as I arrived in Austin, I met up with Simon Willison in the baggage reclaim area, as he was there to meet with Adrian Holovaty. The three of us shared a bus ride downtown
  • Having dumped luggage and freshened up, I wandered up to the Omni Hotel bar. Traditionally a good meeting place for SXSW-ers, this year it was dead on a Friday night, so I left after a few Buds and headed for Manuel’s on Congress. It was Tantek’s 35th birthday celeb, and somehow I remembered the location from memory (I had assumed that I would not be able to make it and wrote it off). There I met with Molly, Jeffrey Z was there, as was Steven Champeon with Heather and a whole bunch of others. It was official - the SXSW parties had started :-)
  • Afterwards we all headed off to another bar (whose name I can’t recall - just following the crowd) where we met up with all the people who’d been at Break Bread with Brad. It struck me that there could have been fewer places on earth other than it that beer garden on an Austin Friday evening where you could meet so many brilliant people who are making the web what it is today. Truly the cream of the crop. And most of them were doing their darndest to kill off their braincells!
• Saturday
  • I realised early on this morning that being at SXSW without a laptop/handheld with a wireless/wi-fi connection is a complete waste of an opportunity. The wireless lets you chat with buddies to arrange lunch, work out if you’re sat in a good panel/presentation or whether you should de-camp to a better one, it lets you interact with presenters to ask questions discretely that they can screen if they wish. I realised how important this connectivity is when my Powerbook’s ‘poor’ wireless reception got demoted to ‘absolutely, completely busted’. Consequently, I sat for 1.5 hours in the convention centre early in the morning wondering where wveryone was and waiting for someone I know to come past and hopefully find somewhere for lunch. I would have to pay a trip out to Austin’s Apple Store later on.
  • Jeffrey Zeldman’s opening remarks were very entertaining, pressing home the point of the social aspect of SXSW. He recounted how problems with the babyseat and the cab (seat sliding all over the place) had prevented Carrie and baby from attending, which was a real shame. Still, he’d be amongst friends.
  • I missed the beginning of Andy and Jeremy’s ‘How to Bluff Your Way in CSS‘ presentation (preparing for the panel I would be on tomorrow), but the second half seemed pretty good, and it looked like their Brit humour was not wasted on the predominantly American audience. The recurrant joke about going out and buying a Mac proved persuasive. After their presentation, I went out and bought a new iBook G4. Damn that faulty wireless! I was not let my little Powerbook’s problems stop me locating a good lunch spot or watering hole for the evening!
  • In the evening, many of us met up at Buffalo Billiards, a good-sized location to round-up all the various standardistas from WaSP, CSS-Discuss, Web Design L and so on. James Craig kindly arranged the event, and maybe next year it will make it on to the ‘official’ parties list, who knows? After that, it was off to the Frog Design party (who James works for, coincidentally). I had attended the year previously where the queues for the toilet and for the free beer were crazily long and the band were shocking. This year the band was fantastic, they were limiting the number of people who could come in, so it was less like a tin of sardines, but the queues for the bar and toilet were still bad (the latter especially so, but I managed to find myself a convenient alley outside the building and around the corner that was still quicker to walk to. Sorry, needs must and all that)
  • There was another bar after that finished but I took it easy because Sunday morning would be when I did my thing on stage.
• Sunday
  • Accessibility: Can’t We All Just Get Along? was the name of our gig, which was brilliantly moderated by Glenda Sims and included myself, James Craig and Derek Featherstone. From my viewpoint, it seemed to go well, we had fun and we had quite a good turnout despite last night’s opening parties. Joe Clark has written about it, as did Matt May. It was nice to get it out of the way, though - 10am is a good time slot from that point of view!
  • I attended the ‘More Hi Fi Design with CSS‘, a panel format similar to previous years that expanded on some of the good techniques that were covered in the previous year. I generally find, though, that these panels are less of a chance to learn about techniques (many of which a large number in the audience are already employing) but more of a chance to learn how to present the ideas to a large audience effectively (Hi res, bandwidth-hungry video download available here).
  • In the afternoon, I attended two accessibility presentations, namely

    How to Use Accessiblity Guidelines, Standards and Testing and

    How to Incorporate Stunning Multimedia Into Your Accessible Site. The former was more useful than I thought it would be. In previous years I’ve thought that there was too much talk of tools that were not available to the average person in the street, namely Watchfire-type enterprise tools. How can a single developer benefit from hearing about such tools? Well, interestingly enough Michael Cooper from Watchfire was on the panel, and sure, he mentioned some of the reporting that Watchfire provides, but he also showed a number of tools that can be obtained freely for developers to use. Time didn’t allow for a practical demonstration of thses tools, but it was a welcome gesture. The second presentation promised to be interesting. I’ve seen Bob Regan present before and he was very good , but this afternoon’s wasn’t great. I know little about Flash, but wanted to find out what qualified as ’stunning multimedia’. The early examples shown were good but there were still too many teething problems with the demo that combined with a nervous presentation style (from ‘the other guy’) to leave me thinking that an opportunity to wow the audience had been lost.

  • After the panels for the day, all us WaSP members that were attending SXSW had a get-together (and had to shoo away a few non-WaSP but equally well-meaning types away in the process, but that’s another story entirely). Despite a 1.5 hour meeting that started at the same time as the Web Awards 2005’s start time, I still managed to make it for the first presented award. You could say that they were running a tad late!
  • Like many others, we ended up at the Pluck after-awards party, but beyond that I have no idea what the names of any other places we visited were. I will say this though: It’s damn difficult to get proper drunk at SXSW in the evening. In case you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about (or in case you spotted me on this night or previous nights proving the contrary), this is what I’m on about - there’s free beer at lots of events, but it’s all Miller Lite. So, free beer. Difficult to turn down really, but also damn difficult to detect any actual alcohol content! The bins of chilled bottled beer get steadily emptier, the toilet queues get bigger and people remain steadfastly sober. But we tried, all the same!
• Monday (most, but not all, typed out)
  • Attended the Does Design Matter? discussion with J-to-the-Z, Kelly Goto, Jason Santa Maria and Joe Clark. The presenters covered issues of sites that seem to do well despite what appear to be some horrible design problems (mostly from having too much information and too little space)
  • How to Inform Design: How to Set Your Pants on Fire was the next one I attended. I was disappointed that time ran out and I never found out what the second half of the panel title meant. But not as disappointed as Jeff Veen not sharing an image I sent him via Rendezvous which, I believe, demonstrated it perfectly. (He later admitted that the prospect of opening a file with extension of .jpg on stage, un-vetted seemed a little, erm, scary.)
  • At lunch, a bunch of us managed to get to Iron Works for our first Texas BBQ. The fact that it was an establishment endorsed by George W Bush didn’t make us turn around and head the other way. Besides, the Brits among us (Richard, Jeremy) were not interested in going back to the keynote presentation of Ana Marie Cox, being as it would be full of American political in-jokes/bitching. What is a wonk, by the way? Food and company, then, both good!
  • Afternoon started with the Flash vs HTML Game Show. Simple idea - two teams of clever types tackling existing sites in Flash and HTML and presenting their efforts. While Dunstan did a great job with his HTML version of a mountain biking trial site, it was clear that the Flash version had won it. Well, clear to me, at least, but the audience appeared to be voting on personality rather than function ("Dunstan’s cool, he has cute puppies, let’s vote for him"). By the way, before anyone reads this as bitching about Dunstan, not true (I actually owe Dunstan big for a favour he did on Saturday) - I just think that the vote went the wrong way there and I suspect Dunstan was thinking the same at that time too, no matter how good his work on that was. Anyway, the various to-ing and fro-ing of re-designed sites continued but the day (or the competition overall) was won by Dunstan and Chris Wetherell, with their excellent use of HTML, Dom Scripting/JavaScript showed how to improve/tweak Flickr. The audience was wowed. I suspect the Flash team were too (but probably wouldn’t admit it!)
  • In the evening I managed not to convince all the Brits attending to go to 20×2. I mean I didn’t convince them all to go. I was not succesful in making them go, not I was successful in telling them not to go. Ah, I should have just edited for clarity … anyway, Andy Budd and I made it down there where plenty of others had heard about the event (20 speakers have 2 minutes each to answer a question, this year: "What’s the word?"). Standard was excellent as ever; 20×2 is the one thing at SXSW that I never have and hopefully never will miss (emphasis added for the benefit of those Brits that thought eating was more important, hah!)
  • Nick Finck’s birthday
  • Gawker party
  • Getting lost
  • Having a personal message from Strongbad
  • The Hilton, 17th floor, late night
• Tuesday (Largely untyped)
  • Web Design 2010
  • Decentralized Social Networks
  • Looking for ATMs for Dunstan …
  • The last lunch-time meal was at PF Chang’s, a SXSW favourite. I was there with the likes of Molly, Dave, Tantek, Dunstan, and Porter sorry, can’t be arsed to list everyone). The point of mentioning this is that there was little talk about web stuff, because Dunstan mentioned that at a previous lunch someone had asked the question "What are you secretly passionate about?". Turns out that for Dunstan, it’s bathroom design. He has a perfect design in his head and is very critical when using other bathrooms about the placement/design of things. The lunch event turned into a very enthusiastic critique of the design of toilet roll holders, the precise routines that people use for drying themselves (always the same routine? Answer: mostly yes!), discussions about the best/worst designs for taps (or faucets, as cultural conventions necessitated). It was amazing just how enthusiastic people were, to the point of Dunstan demonstrating his two-handed action for rolling up and grabbing sheets of toilet paper. Half the table got carried away while the other half had to laugh at how crazy it was getting. I tell, after that lunchtime, we could have formed a bathroom design consultancy and taken over the world of bathroom design! By the way, my secret passion was DJ-ing/scratching/mixing :-)

I’ve never used Gmail.

I feel like a leper or some other kind of social outcast. The thing is, it never appealed to me while on travels (I’d much rather have mail on the laptop with me), but now I’m back in the world of the connected, I’d like to give it a go at least. I’ll need an invite though, nudge, nudge, wink, wink …