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I’m going to follow the lead of the Airbag crew and mention publicly that, as per the decision I reached last March, I will not be attending SXSWi this year. I thought about posting to that effect a few months ago and decided against it—what, am I supposed to post about every conference I’m not attending? That doesn’t exactly scale.

But there really is something different about SXSWi. It’s the annual tribal gathering for our field and a couple of related fields, or at least is the annual tribal gathering who aren’t freaky/insane/hardcore enough to hit Burning Man. The default assumption is that you will be in Austin in March, which is actually a symptom of the conditions that led me to opt out this year.

I can sum up why I’m not going in just a few quick bullet points (and if you’re going to attend any panels, get very used to bullet points):

• I can’t concentrate above a certain noise level
• I don’t function well in large crowds
• I don’t drink alcohol
• I’m not single

There is a last selfish reason to go, which is to see a bunch of friends and acquaintances I don’t get to see other places. Only SXSWi has grown so incredibly huge that I didn’t really get to do even that last year. There were people who were there the whole time I was that I never saw, like Matt. I don’t mean that I didn’t have enough time to talk with them, either. I mean that at no point did photons scattered by their bodies land on either of my retinas.

Don’t get me wrong: SXSWi is a huge buzz. You can get a geek high just standing around soaking up the ambient energy, and you never know who you’re going to run into. I once shared a cab with Cory Doctorow and Lisa Rein without, I think, any of us really knowing who the others were until halfway through the trip. The opportunities to meet and greet and get to know people of every kind are just incredible. Like I said, it’s a tribal gathering.

So there is of course a part of me that’s sad I won’t be there, because the great thing about SXSWi is the people, both those I know and those I don’t know yet. There’s a much bigger part of me, though, that’s glad I’ll be spending those five days at home with my family instead of feeling frustrated and lonely in a crowd notably bigger than the town where I grew up.

Anyway, if you’re going and especially if you’re going for the first time, I urge you to pay special attention to the wisdom of Mr. Bag:

Want to meet that OMG OMG OMG blog A-lister?! Fine, just go do it. Nobody, and I mean nobody in this industry is so huge that they can’t be bothered to say hello and shake your hand. And that’s it, done.

To which I’d only say “that OMG OMG OMG blog A-lister” should be replaced with “anyone who interests you”. Blog A-lister, design rockstar, code guru, startup maven, whoever. Just go up and say hi and spend a few minutes chatting. It’s totally cool. In fact, it’s kind of the point.

Herewith I present the latest in what can only now be called a series of travel-tip posts. (The first one, published a couple of years back, was about avoiding jet lag, if that’s of interest.)

I recently came upon a way to while away the lonely hours of a long plane flight and thought I’d share. Two words: commentary track. More specifically, listening to the commentary track (or tracks) of a movie you’ve already seen and enjoyed.

How is this better than just watching a movie? Well, because you’ve seen the movie, you don’t really need to watch it: you can just listen to the commentary. Thus, you can crank your laptop’s screen brightness down to “off”, thus saving some battery power. Which you’ll need, thanks to the power required to drive the DVD. If the commenter says, “Ooo, look here at this bit of the screen”, you just pip the brightness up enough to see what’s going on, and then crank it back down after.

Of course you can rip the movie with the commentary audio track to your hard drive to save the battery even more. Also, if you’re willing to live without visual reference, you can rip the audio track itself and listen on an iPod. But honestly, how many of us will go to that level of effort? It’s a lot easier to bring along a single DVD and pop it into the laptop. I also like this approach because plane flights are one of the few times when I have enough enforced downtime to get through a whole commentary.

Of course, if you’re lucky enough to be on one of the newer planes with grounded power outlets, your power worries are moot. Still, when you have five or six hours ahead of you, a good commentary track or three is a good way to make the time pass more quickly.

Some news for folks in London (UK) and Cleveland (US). If you don’t fit either of those descriptions, well, I don’t know what I can do.

For those of you in or near London, I’ll be at a Geekminidinner the evening of Tuesday, 14 August 2007, which you can read a bit more about over here. (Apparently, I need to print out an article I wrote a while back and staple it to Ian’s forehead.) Come on ’round and join us!

About four and a half hours after that starts, I’ll be missing (in both senses of the word) the Cleveland area Web Standards/Web Design Meetup. Once left for dead, this group has come roaring back thanks to the tireless efforts of a COBOL dude who is much less scary than his profile photo would seem to indicate. He does run the Ubuntu Satanic Edition, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. Seriously, he’s a great guy. I have never once heard him say “SATAN!” in a deep growly voice, no matter how many times I ask.

The point being, 18 people have already said they’ll be at the Meetup, and you should absolutely add yourself to that list. Assuming you will actually be there, of course.

As for London, I don’t know how many will be there, but probably not as many as the Cleveland gathering. Hey, it’s okay, folks. Don’t feel down about it. Not everyone can be as cool as Cleveland. We’ll do our best to have a good time regardless.

I don’t know about you, but I keep a “staging” file for my posts here. It’s a text file on my hard drive where I can write posts offline, and can also keep a list of things I want to write about. Right now, that list is longer than a typical short entry. I suppose two weeks’ vacation (photos from which are slowly going up on Flickr) will do that to a schedule, especially with all the driving that was involved. (And may I express my deep and unbounded loathing of the usually ambiguous and often misleading road signage in the New York City/New Jersey area? Yes? Thank you. I needed that.)

So, to begin the jamcracking: AEA Chicago’s early bird deadline is fast approaching; it’s just nine days away as I post this. As we start gearing up for the show, we’ve re-started (and rebooted) an AEA feature called “Better Know A Speaker”. Originally, these were testimonials from Jeffrey and me, but that turned out to be more than our schedules can accommodate. So we’ve redone them as short interviews with speakers, which I think is far more interesting anyway. The first of these new BKAS pieces, with Dan Cederholm, went up last week. This week we’ve got Jeremy Keith. In the weeks to come, we’ll cover the rest of our Chicago speakers. The AEA news feed is of course the best way to keep up with these tidbits and other AEA info, but I’ll probably either blog or linkblog them here as well.

We climbed out from Cleveland, rising above snowy muted fields and west-edge suburbs, bound for San Francisco. As the ascent continued, the plane striving beyond personal electronics altitude, the whiteness below thinned out, fading to the dull brown of winter. By the time we passed out of the cloud cover streaming off the lake, the snow had disappeared completely.

From the middle of Ohio to the middle of Indiana, there was no snow to be seen. It was then that we started to see curved and blurry regions of snow, a light smear of frosting spread southeast from the shores of Lake Michigan. Just beyond Chicago, the ground began to turn pale again, shading back from brown to white. By the time we reached Iowa, winter had taken over; floes of ice were visible in rivers and lakes.

Viewed from five miles aloft, the only thing that saved the landscape from taking on an Arctic primality was the roads, houses, and sketches of field boundaries. Even at that, I was reminded of flying above Greenland. There was a faint feeling of another Ice Age, of a chill not entirely attributable to the air handling in the plane’s cabin nor the thin air screaming just beyond the plastic window.

The snow did not release its grip on the land until we reached Nevada.

In San Francisco, the locals complained insistently about the cold.

You know you have a great piece of luggage when the TSA guy rooting through it at the security checkpoint asks where he can get one.

As it turns out, we have four great pieces of luggage, all from Briggs & Riley. I’d never heard of them either, at least not before walking into a luggage store this past October. However, if you’re someone who travels a lot, or even someone who appreciates real quality in a product, then you need to hear about Briggs & Riley.

Let me start off with the coolest part: their lifetime unconditional repair guarantee. If your luggage breaks or is otherwise damaged for any reason whatsoever, including damage caused by airline handling, Briggs & Riley will fix it for free. Why? Because they use that failure information to improve future models. They take the cost of fixing a sold product as an investment in real-world research. That’s smart, and had me ready to like them from the start.

That said, I shudder to imagine the forces that could damage one of these cases enough to require repair. They’re tough, solid bags. They cost quite a bit more than the stuff you can get on sale at Target or Kauffman’s, but they’re worth it. They’d be worth it even if the warranty was time-limited.

For checked bags, we got two expandable cases. These have two heavy-duty expansion rails on the inside of the case which can increase its depth by almost 20%. They’re two-position mechanisms that lock into place, so you don’t have to worry about the suitcase self-expanding or -compressing. On the flip side, the rails that contain the pull handle, the one that slides up or down, are on the outside of the case. That gives you more interior room. They’ve also got serious rubber tires, not cheap plastic rollers. Like I said, these are solid cases.

They’re also exceptionally well thought-out. Every detail quietly announces attention to and consideration for the end-user. The piece that really sold me is the Executive Traveler. It has three compartments: one for suits, complete with a hang-bag; a slightly deeper clothing compartment; and sandwiched between them, a slot for the laptop briefcase that comes with the bag. On the outside are two zippered compartments with a lot of pockets, and on the other side, between the handle rails, is a zippered pocket that would easily accept a bottle of water, if you could bring that sort of incredibly dangerous substance through security these days. Not to worry: it makes a fantastic place to put a book, an iPod, and some compact headphones.

The Executive Traveler is sized to be carry-on luggage, and has enough space for a five-day trip with a suit or two, if you’re efficient with your packing and don’t take along a second pair of shoes. (If you do pack a pair, then you can probably still get three days of clothes in there, including suit.) What else?

• Inside one of the outer zippered compartments, there’s a heavy metal clip on the end of an elastic strap, which is perfect for clipping on your car keys for easy access when you get back home.

• At the center of one edge, there’s a zippered compartment built into the case that has an intense orange interior. It’s meant for travel documents, and it’s bigger than it first seems. It can take a collection of passports and boarding passes, keeping them right where they’re easy to slip out and back in. The orange interior provides contrast when you’re rooting around in there, and it also makes it really obvious when you’ve forgotten to zip it shut.

• There are bunches of elastic straps in the clothing compartments to keep things in place. For the center briefcase compartment, there are elastic stretching membranes that let you open it pretty wide while holding things together.

• It comes with a hangable compact toiletry kit that holds more than it seems like it should.

• Any place there’s a snap, one half of the snap is mounted on a loop of fabric and the other half is mounted on a small tongue of fabric. This lets you slide your finger through the loop, put your thumb over the tongue, and press the two together. Snap!

And then there’s the computer briefcase, which is good enough to have become my default. It’s wide enough to accept a 17″ laptop, with a padded interior on the laptop compartment. It’s slim, with leather handles that can be pushed in so they’re flush with the case sides. There are a goodly number of pockets and so on in the front compartment. It also has a flap on the back with an open top and a zipper across the bottom. If you zip it shut, it’s an extra exterior pocket. If you open the zipper, the whole thing slips over the retractable handles on the main case—or any Briggs & Riley case’s handles.

Here’s the kicker: remember the padded laptop compartment? The padding is a little bit wooly, in a way; not scratchy, but a little fuzzy. The case comes with two small padded brackets that go around the edges of the laptop. Good enough, right? Oh no. It gets better. These brackets have Velcro on their exteriors, so they grab onto the compartment’s padding and don’t let go. They become static, padded holders for the laptop—and thanks to their Velcro, you can reposition them if you change laptop sizes. For extra bonus points, when positioned to hold my 15″ Mac to one side of the compartment, there’s just enough space left over to hold a regular-size mouse, a small digital camera, or any number of other goodies.

You’d think it would be really hard to get them in, and you’d be right, except Briggs & Riley ships them with heavy cardstock sleeves. You put the sleeves over the brackets, place the brackets where you want them without any trouble, and slip out the sleeves. The compartment sides press against the brackets, the Velcro latches onto the padding, and you’re done. Sheer genius.

This might seem like a bit too much love for a travel case, but trust me, it’s just the start. I could go on at least twice as long. Frequent travelers already know why I’m so over the moon about these suitcases, and are probably wondering where they can get their own. Even infrequent travelers should bear Briggs & Riley in mind the next time they’re in the market for luggage. The high quality and lifetime unconditional warranty make them more than a worthwhile investment, and they’re sturdy enough that you don’t have to be too concerned about the fate of your stuff. I mean, sure, you still have to worry about TSA folks opening your luggage, but with these cases, at least you know they’ll be impressed when they do so.

Thanks to everyone who gave me suggestions for something to do on a Saturday in London. There were far too many good choices, as one expects in a millenia-old city. I found the prospect of the Tate Modern to be very, very tempting, but as it turned out I crashed hard and slept very late that morning, so I didn’t feel like I could really do the Tate justice.

So instead I decided to walk south and pay a visit to the person who’d pleaded for CSS help in the comments, since their offices were only five minutes’ walk from my hotel and on my way to other points of interest. You might wonder why I would do that, why I would in effect work, when I had only one day in London, but you know what? London’s been there a long time, and will most likely continue to be there a long time. I could never see all of it, not even if I were to move there. Helping others out is something immediate, vital, and it’s something I like to do when possible. I was there, he was very close by, and so why not?

As it turned out, he didn’t actually have a CSS problem, but we had a lovely lunch at a gourmet burger place right across the street from St. Paul’s Cathedral. That didn’t seem weird or anything.

From there, I crossed the Thames at the Farringdon/New Bridge/Blackfriars bridge, and made my way along the south bank to the Westminster Bridge. In the broken late afternoon sun, I took in living statues and the Eye, a combination which seems far more Tolkienesque than is really necessary. Perhaps fittingly, there was also a book fair beneath Waterloo Bridge, albeit one I regretfully did not peruse—I was afraid I’d be there until the next morning. Once I reached Westminster Bridge, I cut inward to check out the Imperial War Museum—what can I say? I’m a history geek, which you might have guessed from the fact that it was my major field of study in college. I’d also given thought to seeing the Cabinet War Rooms, but again, time was short. I spent a couple of hours wandering randomly through the nooks and crannies of the IWM, and then skedaddled out of there to catch a train to the BBC Backstage Bash. It was loud, it was fun, I traded conference organizer war stories with Patrick Griffiths and got into a short conversation about nihilism with a lovely young lady, and I met more people than I can remember but not nearly as many people as I’d have liked. A whole kettle of thanks to Ian Forrester and the BBC crew for inviting me to such a great party.

If you’re interested in a short visual record of the day, you can see my photos from the War Museum, two pictures from the Bash, or just the whole general collection of all London photos I’ve Flickred. Thanks again for all the suggestions!

So I’m here in London, midway through a two-day workshop on CSS and XHTML. I’ll be doing that all day Friday, collapsing into a coma, and then rocking out at the BBC Backstage bash on Saturday night before boarding a flight for America on Sunday.

That leaves me all day Saturday in London to do… something. Anyone have any good suggestions? In a past visit, I’ve seen St. Paul’s, Buckingham Palace, and the Houses of Parliament from the outside; ridden a double-decker; and wandered a few of the parks; but beyond that London’s a pretty well unknown realm to me. I’m up for a last-minute group gathering or just pointers on what a tenderfoot ought to make sure he does before setting off again. What say you, gentle readers?