Year: 2006

The fifth and final day of my inaugural SxSW experience started, well, late. After returning to my hotel the night before (well, earlier that morning to be more accurate) I had all intentions of waking up at 9am Tuesday, but apparently I was sleeping heavily enough to ignore a nuke going off next to my head…

Soooo, after getting to the Convention Center around lunch time, and hanging out with other tired folks in the hallway, my first panel of the last day was Dogma Free Design (yes, the 3:30pm panel… oh hush…). I had been looking forward to this panel, but I was let down — there was a lot of talk about “checklists” and how to deal with large organizations’ propensity to require (nay, indulge in) mounds of unnecessary (useless?) paperwork, excel spreadsheets, etc. Not that the subject matter wasn’t important to a certain segment of the audience, but I think the title and description of the panel were misleading. Moving on…
(more…)

Monday morning was actually more like Monday afternoon after my 6:30am return to L’Auberge De Wellesley, so I missed the first few panels (which was unfortunate, since I really wanted to attend CSS Problem Solving and Microformats: Evolving The Web, but as it turns out I didn’t miss much: the general consensus seems to be that the CSS panel was a mixture of boring and not useful, and that Microformats are an interesting idea that just doesn’t seem to have a lot of practical use outside of the blogging universe at this point in time… I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on those guys though).
(more…)

Sunday, aside from the aftermath of a fun Saturday night which caused me to miss the first two panels (whoops), started out with Dave, Cameron, Kelly and Brian‘s Demystifying the Mobile Web (personal points of interest include: there are approximately 200 different mobile units shipping in the US market alone; over 40 different browser types/versions; mobile versions of XHTML/CSS have a decent amount of support).
(more…)

OK, so I actually have to do a quick wrap-up about Day 2: Jason and Jim’s opening remarks were fun, though most of what Jason had to say he’s said before on SvN, but I still enjoyed hearing him speak in person. Jim’s comments were in a way more applicable to my current interests, since I’ve been employing much of what Jason is in favor of (process-wise) for a while on my own. In all, an entertaining and somewhat educational hour.
(more…)

As I was wandering around Austin this evening (needed some time to catch my breath after these last two days), a guy randomly came up to me at 6th and Trinity and asked if I had a “paper dollar” in exchange for 4 quarters. Odd, but hey, I had a dollar bill, so I figured, why not (yes, I’m also the guy who gives spare change to panhandlers when they ask).
(more…)