Thoughts From Eric Archive

Boy, Dave wasn’t kidding: available hotel rooms for SXSW are mighty few and far between.  I ended up at the Radisson, just like Dave and a few other people I know, and that was only by calling the Radisson directly instead of going through the SXSW housing desk, which doesn’t have any more rooms available there.  The direct booking was more expensive than the SXSW rate, but at least I’m on the north side of the river—oh, excuse me, the lake.  Plus I got a king suite for only a few dollars more than the conference rate for a single room in the Hilton, and there’s free wifi in the lobby.

I called a number of other hotels directly, and most of them were booked up solid.  Apparently, there’s a very large writers’ conference ending the day before SXSWi begins, and that’s thrown extra monkey wrenches into the gears.

So if you still haven’t booked your room, don’t wait any longer, and try calling places directly even if the SXSW site shows them as sold out.  Otherwise, you’ll be a mile or more away, pay through the nose, or both.  I’d have booked sooner, except I wasn’t even certain that I’d be going until a couple of weeks ago, and in the chaos of prepping for AEA and our annual holiday party, I didn’t get to booking until today.  Hopefully, you’ve avoided my mistake, but if not, don’t compound it.

So… anyone else staying at the Radisson?  We could all geek out in the lobby some night.

• No Room at the Inn was published on Monday, December 12th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Travel category.
• There have been thirteen replies.

The Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal explosion and fire has doubtless dominated news in the UK and Europe, though in all honesty it hasn’t gotten major play here in the US.  Doubtless that’ll change if it’s found to be a terrorist attack and not an accident, but that’s not actually my point.  It occurred to me that this is a relatively high-yield detonation, and I have the means to chart its effects in a basic way.

So, based on the seismic report of a 2.4 magnitude event, I’ve estimated the yield at about four metric tons of TNT (as per the chart found on the Wikipedia‘s Richter scale article, as well as other sources).  As you can see on the chart, that gives figures consistent with initial damage reports: the 0.25psi ring extends out to 1.02 kilometers (0.64 miles), which is about where you’d stop seeing widespread window shattering and door displacement.

Remember that the distances shown don’t define the distance out to which a human would be able to feel a blast, and certainly don’t say anything about the distance at which a blast could be heard.  And also remember that I’m making a rough estimate of yield based on an initial estimate of the explosion’s seismic magnitude, not to mention I just made a guess as to the exact epicenter.

Still, it’s interesting to be able to chart the event like this.  To me, anyway.

• Mapping the News was published on Monday, December 12th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Projects and Tools categories.
• There have been four replies.

Jeffrey and Jason have added their thoughts about AEA to the collective consciousness, and you should go check them out if you haven’t already.  We’re getting more formalized feedback now, and I’ve been surprised to see how highly attendees rated the “Fully Em-Based Layout” presentation.

I said before that it needed a good deal of work, and I still believe that.  My suspicion is that the concept was so strongly appealing that it overcame my deficient presentation.  What was so wrong with the presentation, in my eyes?  That I jumped straight into it with no real preamble, piled several related points and ideas on top of each other, and expected the crowd to keep up.  Going by the attendee feedback, most of them did, but that’s not good enough.  With some tuning, it can be a truly kick-ass presentation.

There’s one more thing I’d like to do here, and that’s recognize our small but powerful crew of volunteers.  In alphabetical order:

• Jon Aldinger, who well and truly rocks on
• Dan Mall, who despite being a paying attendee still helped us with setup and registration
• Peter Santa Maria, whose name seems oddly familiar somehow
• Rob Weychert, vaguely crazy yet generally hoopy frood

Our thanks to you all, gentlemen.  Your efforts made the whole thing go smoothly, and without your contributions we’d have been in a world of hurt.  We should have asked you to stand and be recognized at the event itself, but hopefully this will help make up for it.

I feel like I must be forgetting someone, which is really embarrassing and yet somehow inevitable.  If I did miss anyone, hopefully they’ll let me know so I can update the post to include them.  And then whistle idly while closely studying the opposite wall and act, old-school Soviet style, like their names were always there.

• Exceeding Expectations was published on Friday, December 9th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been four replies.

Well, An Event Apart Philadelphia is in the history books.  (Or, as they might say on the original Iron Chef, “Battle Standards is OVAH!!!”.)  If you want to relive the event, vicariously or otherwise, there’s a Flickr group for the event, as well as all the public photos tagged “aneventapart”.  As I write this, those two sets of pictures don’t form a perfect union, so if you’re really curious, it’s worth checking out both.

I haven’t seen any feedback yet, so I only know what I thought of the event.  At the risk of sounding egotistical, not to mention ungrammatical, I thought it went great.  There were things that could have gone better—my presentation on em-based layouts particularly needs some buffing and polishing—but given that it was the first in the series, and as such largely uncharted waters, I’m not sure I could be happier about how things went.  Even the problems that arose, like the morning crushing of the wifi, were corrected quickly.  The audience seemed really involved and their questions were sharp.  We got a few laughs.  Life was good.

Jeffrey and I would like to sincerely thank each and every attendee for making the event so great, and to thank our sponsors (AIGA, Media Temple, New Riders, and Pixelworthy) for helping make the event possible at all.

• Post-Event was published on Tuesday, December 6th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been twelve replies.

Speaking of AEA, the good people at AIGA released another podcast interview with Jeffrey Zeldman.  Rumor has it they’ll have one coming soon starring Our Man Stan, and there might even be another from yours truly.  Grab hold of their podcast feed if you’re interested in any of that, or in hearing from other designers in the future.

(One week to go.  Woo hoo!)

Update: Jason’s interview is now available.

• AIGA Interview Redux was published on Monday, November 28th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Interviews and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

Quite suddenly, workshops and seminars seem to be all the rage, don’t they?  The Carson Workshops schedule keeps growing, and the shows selling out.  They recently announced a Web applications summit in London that frankly sounds amazing.  UIE recently announced a six-city roadshow, and seats are already selling.  Clear:left is sponsoring a one-day show on Ajax programming starring the indominitable Jeremy Keith.  And then of course there’s my personal favorite, An Event Apart, which sold out six weeks before the Philadelphia event (which is, yikes, now only a week away!) and is soon to visit other cities.  Keep an eye on the AEA RSS feed to get the latest on those cities, by the way.

Look over all the workshops’ line-ups, and you see a lot of big names and smart people standing on stages (or at least in front of rooms) talking about some truly important and interesting topics.  A determined workshop-goer could run him- or herself quite ragged trying to catch even half the shows, given their geographic dispersion and temporal proximity.  It’s almost a shame, because every one of them sounds really, really interesting.  Have I said the word “interesting” enough times yet?

But really, the most interesting part to me is not that these seminars are being announced, but that they’re generating such strong interest—that they’re selling out.  It’s another indicator, and a very clear one, that the industry is well and truly recovering.

Addendum: just to add a little bit more support to what I said, 37signals announced their overhauled Basecamp seminar, The Getting Real Workshop, and sold all fifty seats in twelve hours.  Whoa.

• So Many Stages was published on Sunday, November 27th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Web category.
• There have been six replies.

After a lovely Sunday morning breakfast at the Farmers Market in Los Angeles, Kat, Carolyn, and I strolled through The Grove to check the sights and pick up a gift card for some friends.  As we neared the center of the main drag, Carolyn suddenly pointed and shrieked delightedly, “Daddy!”

She was pointing directly at the large white logo in the middle of the silver façade of the Apple Store.

I’m thinking that maybe I need to spend a little less time on my PowerBook.

• The Apple of Her Eye was published on Monday, November 21st, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn, Humor, and Mac categories.
• There have been fifteen replies.

For those of you who’ve always wanted to hear me talk very quickly over a phone connection: AIGA has put up a podcast of me talking with Liz Danzico about design, code, and An Event Apart.  At the end of last week, they published a similar interview clip of The Zeldman.  There are more interview clips to come from each of us in the next three weeks, so keep an eye on the AIGA site or their feed.

Originally these weren’t quite podcasts because they weren’t part of a feed, and thus had no enclosure to download through your aggregator.  AIGA has fixed that now, and you can grab the AIGA podcast feed via the Podcast directory page.  Or, if you want, go to the previously-linked individual resource pages and download the MP3 files directly.  Either one works for me.

• AIGA Interview was published on Wednesday, November 16th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Interviews and Web categories.
• There have been four replies.