Hand Coding

As I do every March, headed down to Austin earlier this month for SXSW. I also brought my new camera along, a Canon 40D which I’ve had since around February. To go along with that, I rented Canon’s 17-55mm f/2.8 IS lens from lensrentals.com (an awesome online lens rental shop, if you ever need that kind of thing).

I had always heard generally good things about image-stabilization including some reports of being able to hand-hold shots down to 1/8 sec or even 1/4 sec. Given that I seem to encounter a fairly average amount of camera shake (as opposed to an extraordinarily low amount of it), I was cautiously optimistic about how much the image stabilization system might be able to help me.

In short, I couldn’t be more pleased. If the phrasing wasn’t so religiously-exclusive, I might even be tempted to call this the Jesuslens (see also: Jesusnoun.) Or, put another way, if this lens wasn’t around $1,000, I probably would have bought it by now. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. I knew that I’d be hand-holding shots at SXSW and I was hoping that this lens would come through for me — it sure did. I managed several keepers at 1/8 sec. and even down to 1/6 sec.

With the aid of the back of a chair in my hotel room for additional sturdiness, I was also able to work through a set of four 1/2-second exposures of the Austin skyline which I then was able to stitch together to form a panoramic. (Incidentally, Photoshop CS3 is more intuitive than I thought it’d be for making panoramas. They’ve really improved that functionality over CS2.) I may have to try that panorama-thing more often — that was kinda fun.

I’m going to SXSW this year (in fact, this weekend) and I was looking around for an online calendar that might help me plan which panels I was going to. (South by Southwest, in case you might not be familiar with it, is a music, film, and interactive festival/conference in Austin, Texas.) The sxsw.com website usually has a semi-usable calendar, but I just couldn’t get it to work this year.

Some friends of mine mentioned a third-party calendaring option, Sched.org, and I thought I’d give that a shot. I must say, I was pleasantly surprised. In fact, it’s great — it’s easy to use, intuitive, and uses just enough Ajax to be helpful without getting in the way. Anyhow, I’ve worked out my calendar and I think I’ve figured out most of the panels that I’d like to go to. As you might guess, if you see two panels listed for the same time slot, it means that I like both of them and just haven’t yet figured out which to go to. For instance, like these:

• Saturday, March 8: Getting Unstuck: From Desktop to Device vs Opening Remarks with Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson (both at 2 p.m.)

• Sunday, March 9: Scope Creep and Other Villains vs Wireframing in a Web 2.0 World (both at 10 a.m.)

• Monday, March 10: Targeting Your Web Site: Accessibility Litigation Update vs WaSP Annual Meeting: Don't Break the Web (both at 5 p.m.)

Of course, I’m open to ideas if you have any suggestions on resolving those stalemates. One way or another, I’ll figure things out :).

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!

I’ve been catching up on my photo processing and my SXSW 2004 photos are now online. I took 31 photos and posted 6 — I probably would have taken more, but there are only so many gadgets I can carry around at once. I could really only comforably carry either my PowerBook or my camera and on some days I just needed the PowerBook more. (For that reason, I’m halfway-tempted to pick up one of those tiny digicams for next year’s SXSW so that I can carry both a camera and a laptop.)

I ended up taking most of my photos on the last day, Tuesday, as I didn’t really need my PowerBook during any of the panels that day (it seems that the last day’s panels are always a bit on the fluff-side). After the morning’s panels, a bunch of us went to eat at a Vietnamese restaurant and that’s where I got most of my photos.

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”. Also, I’ve resized all the images to 1024-width before uploading them as it can be a bit hard to get your head around a full 5 MP image. However, if you want the full-resolution version of any images, just ask.

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.

I enjoyed many of the restaurants in Austin while I was in town for SXSW, but I particularly enjoyed Katz’s. I went there a couple times and, as an all-night deli, it fit in well with our schedules.

I had a cheeseburger one evening, but only after ensuing that I could get it with blue cheese ;). The burger arrived quickly and they weren’t stingy with the blue cheese — there was about a cue-ball sized mound of crumbled blue cheese on the side.

I had trouble piling on all the blue cheese, but I was only too pleased to have such a problem. The patty was moderately thick and warm (though it could have been a touch hotter). Upon taking a bite, I was delivered a massive blue-cheese-and-beef sensation. It was incredibly delicious and among the top three burgers I’ve ever had.

On another occasion, I was in more of a sandwich mood and I went with a turkey club (with avocado, natch). The turkey was succulent and piled high, and the bacon — an often overlooked component — was well cooked with a satisfying crunch.

It was a tasty sandwich, decidedly above-average as club sandwiches go, but the bread didn’t seem to live up to its potential. It was wheat, I believe (a good thing), but it tended to slightly dry out my mouth. Usually, mayo or other condiments in the sandwich would counteract this effect, but not so much this time.

And, just last night, I went after the DFWBlogs / H-Town Blogs Cocktail Event. I wasn’t counting on fitting in a proper dinner that evening, so I had a few protein bars earlier in the evening (Zone bars, specifically).

Nonetheless, I was a tad peckish by the time we arrived (which was close to midnight, if I recall). On previous visits to Katz’s, I had eyed their dessert menu but I hadn’t had room — but now was my chance.

At first, their ice cream / brownie caught my eye, but it had both vanilla and chocoalte ice cream. Not being a fan of chocolate ice cream, I crossed that off my list. Though I don’t like chocolate ice cream, I’m still a raging choco-fiend in general — so, I went in search of other chocolatey items.

Quickly, I narrowed it down to two chocolate cakes: “Chocolate Eruption” & “Death by Chocolate”. A food’s texture lends to its enjoyment for me, but that’s where both of those fell a bit short…

The Chocolate Eruption was described as chocolate-cream cake with nuts and chocolate shavings, while the Death by Chocolate was made up of white & dark chocolate mousses. Chocolate can be delicious in many forms, but I never had much of a hankering for squishy chocolate (well, except for ganache, I suppose). Really, a chocolate cake would have been perfect.

Of the two, I settled on the Chocolate Eruption; I figured that the crunch of the nuts would play well off the soft chocolate cream. The slice arrived and, though it was tasty — I had no trouble finishing it — the creaminess was almost overwhelming. Of course it was probably no creamier than most other chocolate-cream cakes, but that evening I had a yearning for a Real Cake cake which this slice didn’t entirely fulfill.

With so many good dishes, Katz’s is probably one of my favorite restaurants in Austin. I look forward to eating there again next year.

I’m leaving for SXSW around lunchtime, and returning late Tuesday evening (sometime after Mena & Ben Trott’s panel). So, updates may be a bit sparse for a few days.

Does anyone have any restaurant recommendations for must-go-to restaurants in Austin? I’m heading down to SXSW on Friday and though I’ll probably be around Austin natives (or maybe Austin-familiars) most of the time, I’m open to other suggestions as well.

So far, Jon has recommended these:

• Kerbey Lane, especially for breakfast:

  Kerbey Lane Cafe isn’t an Austin institution for nothing. Its winning combination of good, homecooked fare, its cozy setting and hospitable service have made it a local favorite for years. If you haven’t discovered it yet, what are you waiting for? […]

• Trudy’s, Tex-Mex:

  The stuffed avocado ($8.95) was half of an avocado that had been heaped with spicy chicken, breaded and fried. It was topped with the New Mexican green chile sauce and cheese and served with Spanish rice and black beans that also had a little zing. […]

And, Julie passes these along:

• Pizza Nizza, “great pizza”:

  While there are hundreds of combinations possible, there are specialty pizzas that can make the choice easy. Try the veggie deluxe — with grilled onions, marinated artichoke hearts, sauteed spinach, roasted red bell peppers, sundried tomatoes, zucchini, white sauce and mozzarella — or the classic, with pepperoni, ham, sausage, green bell peppers, mushrooms, onions, black olives, marinara sauce and mozzarella. […]

• Chuy’s, Mexican food:

  My favorites include the Chuychanga, a fried flour tortilla filled with chicken, cheese, cilantro and green chile, and the Chuy’s Special enchiladas, blue corn tortillas stacked with smoked chicken, cheese and tomatillo sauce. […]

• Bitter End Bistro & Brewewy has “good beer, and a restaurant there”:

  While the casual ambiance might lead you to think otherwise, the Bitter End has been a consistent source of good food and service. Standouts included the mussels steamed in a white wine broth flavored with curry crème fraîche, garlic chives, lemon grass, sliced red bell peppers and garlic and the pork loin topped with crisp onion rings and surrounded by a cilantro-mint cream sauce. [&hellip]

• Threadgill’s, for barbeque:

  Every time I walk into Threadgills, I get this overwhelming sensation of comfort. Maybe it’s a combination of the history of the place and my personal history with it. I know the food will be delivered on time, attentively, and that it will be good. Trust me on this, there are a lot of places that serve so-called comfort food that do not evoke a sense of comfort in me. Threadgills does. […]

• Magnolia Cafe, especially for breakfast:

  The mixed menu features salads and chicken, vegetarian and fajitas, pasta and seafood, quesadillas and soups, something for practically everyone. And if that isn’t satisfying enough, try a chocolate fudge brownie. Ours weighed at least a half pound. Forks up. […]

• Jazz has “big Cajun food”:

  Black is the color of seriously flavorful fare as well at Jazz. Their blackened catfish resonates thunderously across the taste buds of Austin, and the blackened tuna with a zesty dill hollandaise is enough to make Jean Lafitte himself limp up to the dinner table. […]

• Spider House, for lunch or scones & cake:

  The cool thing about Spider House is that you don’t have to take off when you get the late night munchies. There are always about four or five entree choices, from Tamales by Golly and the Pasta Plate to the Mayberry Bagel, named after a Spider House employee. The prices of the entrees range from $2.95 to $4.95. […]

• Iron Cactus, mexican food [sample menu]

• Katz’s, NY Style deli & open all night:

  The warm spinach-artichoke dip ($6.95) was served with bagel crisps. The half roast chicken ($9.95) was served over dressing with gravy, with the choice of two sides. The open roast beef sandwich ($9.95) featured tender, thick slices of meat with gravy. […]

• Amy’s Ice Creams where you “pick flavor, pick toppings and they have paddles and throw it in the air”:

  On warm evenings, Amy’s can get a little loud with the percussion of ice cream paddles beating candies or cookies into scoops. Look up to catch the sight of those same scoops flying high over the tops of the employees’ crazy hats to land with precision (most of the time) into cones and cups. For obvious reasons, Amy’s has been a local favorite since it opened in 1986. […]

• Stubb’s, “good barbeque”:

  The turkey breast had a delicate smoky flavor and was excellent. The chicken was juicy and flavorful, but the pork ribs, in contrast to the previous times I’ve sampled them, were dry and tough. For sides, the serrano pepper cheese spinach, the collard greens and the creamy cole slaw were our favorites. […]