Fixpert

That’s because it’s CSS Naked Day. I feel so…naked! So far the list of participants is at 545 people. That’s awesome! Everyone has turned off their styles and is baring nothing but pure xhtml markup for all the world to see. Hmm…methinks I need to change my markup to offer a skip to content link, or move things around so that my articles come before the sidebar.

Big ups to Dustin Diaz for putting this even together.

Umm, wtf? Last year, IT Conversations had full coverage via glorious podcast upon podcast of Etech 2005. I can’t find any podcasts of the presentations for 2006 anywhere though. Maybe they’re still working on getting them uploaded, if not I am seriously bummed. Etech 2005 was the best set of podcasts I have listened to, maybe ever. Very inspiring, interesting, I would encourage you to take a listen. But wherefor art thou ‘06 coverage?

Hi everybody. I’m back from my trip to Austin for SXSW. I’m happy to be back in Virginia, though I must say I was shocked and disappointed to discover that Winter is still going on here.

There are, however, the very first signs that spring is on the way — those signs being that everyone around me seems chafed and sick of being cold. They’re calling for snow in a couple days, so if we can all just be patient hold on a little longer, we’ll soon be blessed with the Southern Sauna Style: 95 degree heat and 95% humidity. Virginia weather rocks. You get a little bit of everything here.

I had such a great time at SXSW. It was my first time there and my first ever visit to Austin. I’d like to do some more thorough write-ups and reactions, but seeing as I’m back to my 11+ hr workdays for now (2+ hrs commuting, 8+ hrs at the office, 1 hr lunch) the more detailed posts will have to wait. Bathing and sleeping take priority, sorry guys.

I was pleased to discover that my new employer found this image of me on Flickr:

No one that I work with has any idea what SXSW is (other than one guy who knew about the music portion) and they have been joking me about how I could’ve come over to their house if I wanted to play with Legos…hmm, I should take them up on that! Anyway, here are some quick highlights off the top of my head:

Hightlights:

• Dropped off a Fixpert shirt for Lance Armstrong at his bar, Six
• Nuclear Tacos
• Ate every type of meat imaginable after 8 yrs of vegetarianism
• Talked a bunch of trash about foosball and then lost every game I played — usually to Mike Rundle
• Bruce Sterling’s keynote
• All the new friends: Jake and Dane, John and Tim, on and on…
• Watching City Slickers 2: The Search for Curly’s Gold
• The revenge of the Nuclear Tacos (more like a lowlight)

More to come, leave a comment if you want to post some of your highlights.

Remember when the internet used to be slow and frustrating to navigate? Remember when it was hard to find any useful content online? Me too.

For better or worse, lack of good content and slow connections don’t seem to be issues anymore. These days I can easily flush an hour or two down the drain checking my RSS feeds and posting interesting finds to my del.icio.us account. All of this information is important and relevant to my career, the problem is, I’m not actually reading anything. There is such a huge amount of content online that I am interested in, that I can serially bookmark but never dive in and absorb any information.

If you’re nodding yes as you read this post, then you might enjoy this panel discussion about information and attention from SuperNova 2005 called Your Attention Please. Here’s a brief description from that page:

In a connected world it is becoming very difficult to filter out the information that really needs our attention from that which is irrelevant to us. The panel…tries to come up with answers to the problem of overwhelming information, only some of which deserves our attention. They talk about the tools, practices and new technology being developed to effectively use data which matters to the end user.

Ironically, when I first listened to this presentation, I was walking my dog out in the woods on a beautiful sunny day, but rather than listening to the chirping of the birds, I was listening to this podcast on my iPod. It was such an interesting discussion I didn’t want to stop listening, but it suddenly made me feel a bit conscientious about what I was doing.

Trusted Filters

The discussion of trusted filters was one of the most interesting parts of this presentation in my opinion. With so much content online, we rely on trusted filters to sift through all the information and make recommendations for us. Thus the beauty of sites like digg and slashdot, and del.icio.us’s most popular page. Communities essentially “vote” for good content, and the best content rises to the top. These are all great examples of community-based trusted filters. But again, if you’re just continuously bookmarking and not reading, what’s the point?

If you listen to the Attention podcast, let me know what you think.

I received Jeremy Keith’s DOM Scripting book as a Christmas present this year, and I have finally cracked it open. I have really enjoyed friends of ED books in the past, like Dan Cederholm’s Web Standards Solutions. I’m only about 30 pages in so far, but I can already tell that this is going to be a good read. The language is clear and natural. Jeremy does not appear to be making any assumptions about what I already know. This book is really what I needed to get me started with DOM Scripting and JavaScript — a book written specifically for web designers.