Leverage that dusty old library into new exciting reads!
-
Recent Posts
Permanent Pages
Topics
City at night
Timelapse
The Dark Night: A Time Lapse in Chicago from Kaj Kjellesvig on Vimeo.
Crack Shack or Mansion?
This post is in honor of the Canadian property bubble – It may be hard to estimate what a million dollars will buy in Vancouver. The number of re-sale listings hit an all time record in March. Should only take a couple more months before things start to ease up a bit.
Visit CrackShackorMansion.com to test your skills. (I got 9 out of 16)
Travel destinations
World Heritage sites are justifiable tourist traps.
Equally deserving, but mostly off the official radar screen, is this list of proposed sites.
Hani Rice Terrace in Yunnan China - Proposed UNESCO World Heritage Site
Quote | Work as daily meaning
Work is about daily meaning as well as daily bread; for recognition as well as cash; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday-through-Friday sort of dying.
-Studs Terkel
SXSW Day Five Wrapup
This is the first SxSW entry written without the WordPress iPhone app. Speaking of iPhones, my etimate of iPhone saturation among SxSW attendees is at least 95%. Apple has done with mobile computers (aka smart phones) what Microsoft did with the desktop computers. That is, build an ecosystem for other developers to write on. 150k and counting.
I started Day 5 with the movie Haynesville, a documentary about the mega shale gas discovery in Northwest Louisiana. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie and would recommend it.
I also met an interesting software developer from UT standing in line for the film and we ran in to each other again at the burrito restaurant next door and continued talking. The take away was a much cleared up understanding of languages, libraries, and frameworks. Essentially, lego blocks, cars and buildings packaged up with pre-assembled legos, and then building codes for proper multi developer roll out of entire cities.
Later in the day I attended the panel #MapGeoTurnkey featuring founders of GetSatisfaction, Bluedot, SimpleGeo and Skyhook. This was one of the more remarkable panels in terms of opening my eyes to tools and developments happening around Place. Geo is the Buzz topic of SxSW.
After the presentations and discussions, I asked the first question regarding altitude. The answer is that although geo location reveals the X and Y axis, height is pretty tricky right now. I did get an invitation to build in that realm, but right now development would require overlaying a topographical map. There are questions of fidelity though. Another takeaway is that lat/lon plus a timestamp is considered personally identifiable information according to European privacy laws.
The end of the day consisted of a BBQ with some really smart people with building amazing stuff. I think the big takeaway is that although I felt like somewhat of an internet outsider, the key is to focus on what the world needs that I (as a person and as a skillset) can deliver. I see some opportunities for changing the world and I am inspired to set about that course.
SXSW Day Four recap
Day four started with a panel about leveraging the creative class to solve energy challenges. The takeaway is that like no time in history, the doors in Houston are open and waiting to be knocked on. The creative class just has to make cool shit.
Next up, the social media leader of Chevy set up an event with alcatel-lucent and ElevenAPI. They got about 100 people in the room by giving away a macbook pro. After giving away the computer, 
not me, he got up, introduced himself super briefly, and then open up to the audience by asking us to answer the simple question, “With the advent of the connected car (meaning the car and all it’s sensors open to the Internet), what do you want?”
The range of services suggested was remarkable. The had paper all around the room soliciting ideas and I will eventually post the fifteen minute audience barage mp3 file I recorded. Mine had to do with fuel efficiency, because monitoring the driving style of th operator combined with overlay of a 3d topographical map, you could easily make a game or a badge that ultimately delivers efficiency of the installed vehicle base. Things like passive “Where did I park apps?” will be cool too, but one audience member suggested something I thought was cool around recreating the experience of driving a 1960s Ferrari by piping in audio, cool!
I also attended Jonathan Stark’s panel about developing an iPhone app with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and no need to learn objectiveC thanks to the open source PhoneGap. He covered the difference between this, native, and command line apps. The presenter was from RI and the local wittyness was fun and had the audience laughing repeatedly.
I also took another trip through the exhibit hall floor and the experience reminded me on my AIA conferences. Based on my experience here, i paid far more attention to the panels versus the exhibit hall and I am guessing that reaching architects woul be more effective this way. This would also connect something that Steven Stimson said to me on the phone a few weeks ago. He said talked a bit about some wonderful stainless steel ties that he found. When I asked him about how to reach more architects he said that the single best technique is to be a trusted resource. He said that when he was designing the building, the different issues like brand of anchor ties, cement type, and techniques. He said that he didn’t want to learn all that stuff, he wants to let us teach him.
SXSW Day Three recap
Attended a panel on search and what was interesting is the irrelevance of the panel about “search engines”. I see the transition in search being driven by the applications that empower social information sharing. At one point a panelist finally hit the nail on the head by stating that if you want to know where to go out and you look in foursquared to see where your friends are, that is a search function. Same is true for yelp and restaurants, etc. He wasn’t going to pull up his web browser on his iPhone to find that information, it was an application, particularly social data.
The google link algorithm and trusted websites are essentially the same thing in terms of being socially verified and ways to combat the adversarial battle between good information and spammers.
Attended the exhibitions and saw the folks from concrete5, met recruiters from eBay paypal and AKQA.
SXSW Day Two recap
The big event of day two was meeting up with an old friend Soraya. She established the NY Times social media presence and in doing so made lots of friends in the web industry.
Earlier in the day I met with Microsoft, and Cumulux folks about the cloud platform called Azure.
I also attended a talk led by a representative of Frog Design. The big take away was that people respond to badges not charts.
Demo reel for a wedding videographer
Demo Reel from David Ruzicka on Vimeo.