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While I was in Buffalo to conduct training at the university there, I discovered that I’d failed to pack any books or movies to while away the evenings. Since I didn’t really want to pay $9.95 (or, you know, $12.95) for an in-room movie, I decided to head out to a Barnes & Noble and see what I could acquire.

After finding some classic (and massively discounted) Robert Silverberg and a Jack McDevitt novel I’d always meant to read, I headed back into the music-and-movies section to see what they had in the way of interesting DVDs. Not much, as it turned out. But while I was back there, within the space of about 45 seconds I had two different people ask me if I worked there. The older lady who asked, upon hearing my negative, said, “Oh, I’m sorry. You look like someone who would work in a bookstore.”

“I take that as a compliment, ma’am,” I said, and, smiling, headed toward the front of the store to purchase my books.

So here I am in warm, sunny Austin, which has been chilly and rainy. I actually don’t mind, as the weather is quite nice for the time of year, compared to back home. I have similar reactions in San Francisco, which every November I’m there is chilly but feels great to me, so I’m walking around without a jacket while all the locals are complaining bitterly about how cold it is, and I scoff at them. But anyway, SXSW04 is well underway and things are as crazy as expected. We had a fun css-discuss / Webdesign-L / WaSP / W3C / random folks gathering at the Iron Cactus last night, and I finally got to meet SImon Willison. Actually, I’ve been expanding my rel="met" roster quite a bit, so that’s cool.

So after that gathering, which was organized by James Craig, a bunch of us headed over to the party thrown by frog design. Wow. It was very loud, extraordinarily crowded, and had just the right amount of decadence. There was this big screen on which they were projecting some kind of frog design promotional video, all quick cuts and rapid strobing and MTVesque everything, except it featured stuff on which they’d worked, including the iPod. Then the video player crashed, and they had to reboot the system. I got a picture with Tantek standing in front of the screen as it started up. Thanks to the folks at frog design for giving us one of the funniest moments of the conference to date. (This one’s for you, Scoble.)

When we entered the party, hostesses gave us little plastic cups with fake money in them. Apparently you could gamble in the back, and with enough of this frog money could get little door prizes. Or something. I was amused by the fact that Tantek just walked around the party with a cup in his hand, and people kept stuffing their frog money into it. He didn’t ask, didn’t say anything about the money one way or the other; he just kept being given more for no apparent reason. Considering who employs him, that seemed somehow appropriate.

On Friday night I made a pilgramage to the throne of Lord British, or at least the temporary throne set up in Room 18AB of the Austin Convention Center. Richard Garriott (whose works claimed many, many hours of my youth) and Warren Spector (ditto) talked about the current and future state of electronic gaming. That was definitely enjoyable, as both men were good speakers and had just-different-enough views on the industry to make the session interesting.

I was encouraged to hear that they’re moving toward making online games less massively multiplayer, allowing people to find groups of friends and then let those groups continue playing without having to interact with the rest of the people online. That sounds antisocial, but it’s actually more social than the current games. I’ve avoided online games largely because I don’t want to have to deal with all the pre-teens killing my avatar and crowing about how I’ve been “0wnz0r3d.” Sorry, kids, I have better things to do with my time. If I could play interesting games with a restricted group of friends, though, I might be seriously tempted. If Half-Life 2 comes out for Xbox with a good multiplayer component, that plus Halo 2 will probably be just about all she wrote.

Random observations and thoughts from the drive from New York City to Cleveland:

• There are these signs along Interstate 80 in northern New Jersey that read, “UPGRADE - MAINTAIN SPEED.” They come just before each hill, and I thought they very nicely captured what it’s like to be a computer user.
• Peppered along the Pennsylvania stretch of I80 (all six hours of it), there are signs that read, “BUCKLE UP - NEXT MILLION MILES.” My first thought was, As compared to what reference point?
• In the middle of Pennsylvania, we discovered that hunting season is underway. There were a lot of cars pulled off to the side of the interstate, and we saw quite a few men wearing faded camoflauge and bright orange vests, which seemed like the ultimate in contradictory clothing choices. Later on, we saw a truck with a deer carcass lashed to a platform extended from the back bumper, right underneath the rear window and its stickered slogan: “Life’s a bitch - then you die.”
• I’ve decided that if you’re a civilian and driving a Hummer, you’re basically piloting a giant self-propelled declaration of just how big a jerk you really are. (I considered words other than “jerk” but this is, at least most of the time, a family site.) As a civilian, you have no reason to own one, and even less reason to have it on the road. That goes double for the H2, frankly.
• On a very related note, I spotted a bumper sticker that said, “Supprt OPEC: Buy an SUV.” No kidding! I can’t tell you how pleased I was to learn that Saturn plans to introduce a gas/electric hybrid next year.

Random observations and thoughts from the drive from Philadelphia to New York City:

• A New Jersey license plate reading I4GOTT.
• Back home in Ohio, gas pumps give you all kinds of directions, almost to the point of silliness. After you insert your credit card and quickly remove it, they’ll tell you to LIFT NOZZLE and SELECT GRADE and BEGIN FUELING. Out here on the Eastern Seaboard, the pumps read your card and tell you to OPERATE PUMP. That’s it. I guess if you can’t figure it out from there, it’s not their flippin’ problem.
• There was a big sign right after we got on the New Jersey Turnpike that read “URGENT MESSAGE WHEN LIGHTS FLASHING - Tune radio to 1610 AM.” There were no lights anywhere near the sign.
• If you’re the driver of the large white Durango that was cut off twice by a yellow hardtop Tracker approaching the Verazzano Narrows Bridge, and almost cut off a third time getting onto the Belt Parkway East, early this afternoon, I’m really, really sorry. Between the dense fog and the unfamiliar territory, we kept realizing we had to be in your lane at the last possible instant. I swear to Doug it was nothing personal.

Wow.

Kat and I have just returned from Morimoto, where we had one of the most amazing meals of our entire lives. Although we’d been seated at a table to start, Kat decided (and rightly so) that we should move to the sushi bar. So with a little help from the hostess, we moved to sit at the end of the bar, just a few feet from Morimoto himself, and after a bit of debate we decided to start out with the seared kobe beef and green tea soba noodles. These were by themselves amazing, but they were just the beginning. From there, we moved into the omakase, or chef’s tasting menu. The best part of this was that we were seated right in front of the chef who was creating our meal, a sushi chef by the name of Alex, so we could ask questions and make requests while he prepared our courses. And what did we have?

1. Toro tartare (one of the restaurant’s signature dishes)
2. Japanese oysters on the half-shell with four different sauces
3. Seared scallop
4. Sashimi salad of striped jack
5. Mango sorbet with tiny wasabi beigniets
6. Grilled half lobster in ginger sauce and rice noodles
7. Grilled kobe beef with pan-seared foie gras
8. Nigiri sushi including toro (fatty tuna), kanpachi (juvenile yellowtail), sawari (kingfish), Japanese tai (red snapper), needlefish, fluke, and fluke fin
9. Chocolate temple dessert

It’s difficult to even imagine being able to come up with the words to describe how good everything was. Take the scallop, for example. Alex scraped the meat off of a shell, then sliced it in half and bent over to closely inspect the two halves. We couldn’t figure out what he was doing as he switched his gaze from one to the other, then back. After a few moments he beckoned us close and said, “Look at this one. See around the edges?”

We looked. In the light, the edge was puckering and moving slowly.

“It’s still alive,” he said happily. And then he sliced the meat into chunks, seared it on the sushi grill, and served it up with spicy extra-virgin olive oil and cherry tomato halves.

Even though I hate scallop to the extent that it makes me feel ill, I somehow just had to try a piece. It was actually rather tasty, although I did keep it to that single piece.

The whole time, Alex graciously answered our every question of “Ooo! What’s that?” and “How is that made?” and “How do you get a meal prepared by Morimoto himself?” He didn’t even take that last question personally; I’m sure he gets it all the time. From our perch we got to watch Morimoto make mini-sushi, which we’re told is all the rage now in Japan. Each little piece was maybe a centimeter long. Not only did we think they were too cute for words, so did most of the staff. We saw one waitress run after the server calling, “Wait, let me see, let me see!”

It was, in every sense, an incredible experience. If we ever do make it back to Morimoto, we’ll not only try the omakase again, but we’ll ask to sit at Alex’s station on the sushi bar.

The title of the post exists mostly because I vowed in a public setting to use it, but there is a story behind it. I just don’t remember the details right now, because it happened more than 24 hours ago and I’m very tired. I remember that a small group had gathered at Crepes on Cole for brunch yesterday, and the conversation kept veering wildly from highly geeky to very much the opposite. At some point, the subject of Tantek being in trouble (for a comment? an action? a bug in IE/Mac?) came up, and it was asserted that he needed to be spanked. (”Oh, yes, yes! A spanking! A spanking!”) Then it was observed that we should probably check first with his girlfriend to see if that was acceptable. So I turned to her and said, “So, is it okay with you if we spank him?”

Her reaction was so priceless (and his nearly as amusing), I ended up teasing both of them about it several times, and I wasn’t alone in the effort, either. She never did answer the question, so we still don’t know where she actually stands on the subject. It was a weird day. Relaxing, but weird. Early on we were discussing relationships and the subject of polyamory came up. I speculated that the increasing practice of polyamory might be linked to the rising incidence of attention-deficit disorder. It’s so crazy, it just might make sense.

Pretty much the opposite of ADD is the viewpoint espoused by the Long Now Foundation, which aims to get people thinking about the next ten milennia as opposed to the next ten minutes. Tantek and I met up at the Herbst Pavilion to see Brian Eno give a free talk on the Long Now, and there turned out to be an even Longer Line. With space for 700, and probably 750 in the hall by the time they closed the doors, there were very likely three or four times as many people in line as were eventually admitted. The talk itself was interesting, and Mr. Eno’s presentation style was done in such a calm, deliberate, paced manner that I felt a little more in touch with the Long Now by the time we left, which may or may not have been done on purpose. The instant the talk was over, Tantek and I headed out a side door and toward the parking lot at a jog so we could the crowd to their cars; we had no desire to get stuck in a traffic jam trying to leave. This would be ironic except for the statement I remember from the presentation, that the Long Now perspective is meant to make the world “safe for hurry” by slowing other parts of life a long way down. So we hurried safely, and benefitted from the effort. Yay us!

In many ways, I’m intrigued with and approving of the Long Now concept. If we as a society could take more of a long-term view, we might make different (and hopefully better) choices about how we relate to our surroundings. If you knew that you’d be around for five centuries, how would you live your life differently? If you knew humanity would occupy the Earth for the next ten milennia, how might that alter your patterns of behavior? I’ve generally lived my life employing a long-term perspective, but the longest term I employ tends to be my lifetime. While I might plan for retirement and how I’ll pay for the education of children I don’t even yet have, I don’t generally make plans that are centered on my great-great-grandchildren, because I will almost certainly never live to meet them. Does that make them any less real, or worthy of consideration? Maybe it does, but even the act of deciding that will require a longer view than I usually take.

Clay Shirky’s recent essay on the Semantic Web has stirred enough attention that I had non-techie friends forwarding me the URL. I found it interesting, especially since over the last few months I’ve been working with a few sharp people on a way to address one of the points Clay touched upon. We’re almost ready to make our work public, so watch this space for details as well as an addition to this page.

I’ve been wandering from place to place in the Mission District of San Francisco all afternoon with Doug and Tantek, searching out open WiFi access points that also have open power outlets. We were hanging out at Maxfield’s for a while, but then a live jazz band started playing and we couldn’t hear each other talk. So we moved on, and after snacking on some New York-style pizza (!) have now settled in Muddy Waters on Valencia. What relevance has any of this? Not a lot, but it’s a great excuse to post an amusing picture Doug took with his Sony Vaio TR1AP.

Seybold starts tomorrow, which means I get to show up at Moscone West way too early in the morning to register, get oriented, and get ready for the panel “Speaking in Tongues,” which will discuss the wide variety of standards and choosing which is best for you. Later in the day I’ll present “Bridging the Browser Divide,” a look at the state of standards support. Tuesday, I’ll do “CSS For Navigation,” a slightly reworked version of “Minimal Markup, Surprising Style” (which provided many of the examples in the Listamatic), and then participating in the closing plenary “Future Vision: The Web and Beyond.”

I’d better get some future vision by then, I guess. Think the audience will take me any less seriously if I tell them the Web doesn’t really matter because we’re due to be subjugated by the barbarian hordes of Pluto in the next three years? Think anyone took me seriously in that last sentence?

As much as I like visiting San Francisco and hanging out with such cool people, I can’t help looking forward to my return home. I fly back home on Thursday, which means that for the third year in a row I’ll start September 11th in the San Francisco area. At least this year I’ll end it back in Cleveland, unlike the last two. Contrary to the expectations of some people I’ve talked with, I have no apprehension about flying on Thursday. I figure if there’s one day of the year that’s safest to fly, it’ll probably be that day. Besides, I’m done with conference and client stuff Wednesday evening, and I intend to get back to Kat as soon as possible.

I wrapped up the three-day speaking and training session at Los Alamos National Laboratory yesterday, and it seemed to go really well. This having been my first multi-day training session, I was a little bit nervous that I might have problems with pacing, but everything seemed to come together just fine. The attendees certainly were positive about the material, and how much they learned.

Now I’m off to Albuquerque to catch a flight to San Francisco (by way of Houston) for Seybold. I’ve been four days from home, and have another five before I return. Kat and I talk at least twice a day, and it seems like every conversation begins and ends with, “I miss you.”