i am a camera

My follow-ups to South By Southwest are getting shorter and shorter each year. Mostly this is because what you read elsewhere would be repeated. The folks are the reason for attending and four days at one conference means many opportunities to meet people informally.

In Six Words

Here are my six-word synopses of the most memorable sessions and events I attended

Design is in the Details: Just throw stuff together; magic happens.
Getting Unstuck From Desktop to Device: Still many hairy mobile development challenges.
ABX Bowling / Team VCWear: Dollarsign eyes belie Andrew's genuine kindheartedness.
General Theory of Creativity: Creative magic in associating two things.
Great Design Hurts: Common request - I want a pony.
Godbit Dinner: Wonderfully talented folks all around me.
Design Eye for South By: Design rationale will follow; trust us.
Emotional By Design: Appeal to all your users' senses.
30 ways to delight your users: Users want to rock; be helpful.
Designing for Freedom Every product decision impacts user freedom.
Scalability Boot Camp: Add hardware now, software redesign later.
WASP Annual Meeting: What should we focus on now?
Video Blogging from Iraq: Entire squad watches fellow soldier's surgery.

Several months back, I allowed myself to get sucked into a little Apple-Dell spat -- err....discussion where an acquaintance of mine, Faruk Ateş, "debunked" the "myth" that Apple charges more for the same hardware.

Of course, the systems had differences so the debate raged on, but honestly, I was amazed that Dell's prices were, well...so close to Apple's. Perhaps Apple truly was intent on competing with the PC makers. Fast forward ten months to yesterday when I made a comment about not being Anti-Apple.

Robert was kind enough to tag me for a meme -- along with a few others who don't normally get them. This one asks "Where were you one, five, and ten years ago?"

One Year Ago

Austin, Texas. Not much different than today, a Software Developer at Austin Info Systems, now known as Overwatch Systems working on various products dealing with intelligence gathering and visualization. I had just launched iamacamera.org managed by blosxom.

South by Southwest Interactive was a blast -- as many folks are mentioning in their blogs. I learned a lot. Here are a couple things I want to do differently next year.

1. Get invited to a meal with more folks

Meals are where the real interaction takes place -- folks discuss their current projects and lessons learned. Opinions over panel discussions and where things are going and the inside scoop on what's going to happen soon.

Here's a big reason why I have been unable to attend to Vine Type. I just returned from a ten-day mission trip to Guatemala.

These are some kids from Iglesia Presbiteriana Emanuel in Quetzaltenango where my group helped with construction of new classrooms. The country is trying to recover from a thirty-six-year [1960-1996] civil war and is dealing with the pressures of global economies and internal discrimination.

Welcome to the re-launch of my blog now under the power of Vine Type.

I'm interested in seeing if there's any interest in Yet Another Blog Engine, but with it generating XHTML-valid code on a .NET platform, folks might be willing to give it a try. Especially since it's so easy to test out.

I've tried to pack in the most important blog features, but the primary goal during development has always been standard content management functionality. I like the simplicity of the blog paradigm and I think it can be applied to small-to-medium websites.

Ed Hassinger pointed me to two new Google features that I think are worthy of specific mention.

The first is Google Suggest that provides character-by-character feedback as you type in your search terms. It even includes hit counts in the dropdown list.

The second is Google Maps that has all the normal features of map plotting that we're used to but then provides drag-around capability. Meaning, once your map displays, click (and hold the mouse button down) then drag left or right to reveal more of the map. No need to constantly recenter the map before zooming. But if you do want to recenter the map, simply double-click on a spot and it will recenter to that spot.