During my training the HP presenters ( who make great use of Futura-type face ) had an estimation of a transfer speed which was listed as:
11 Gbps/Sec
Which led me to ask:
“It takes 3.14159 Gbps/Sec?”
Font-dork jokes
If you don’t get it, look at the link above and imagine two 1s together, with tight inter-glyph spacing, or kerning, it looks like the π gyph
A Ruby conference is coming to Austin: Lone Star Ruby Conf
I’m pretty excited about the idea. I think I will register within the next two weeks.
I’m back in Mountain View ( more on that later ) and at the Tapioca Express on Villa and they’re playing “Captain of Her Heart”.
I loved those smooth-singing Englishmen of yesterdecades:
I think that idea is just about due for recycling into the current time. If Interpol mark the return of Joy Division, I should think my request is about 2 years from being granted.
Update
The keen-eyed Social Bobcat spotted my misattribution like a ground-squirrel for supper in his native mountainous terrain. OMD sang “If you Leave”.
Now I see why Bostonians are always going on about what a great place Boston is to go out in.
Last night after the conference my boss and I and another colleague headed to Fanueil Hall area of Boston.
It was kinda like an outdoor mall ( see Stanford Mall ) but set among old colonial buildings ( Ye Olde Brookstone: Thy Pillowtoir since 1668 ). After being given several opportunities to buy tourist schwag we went in hunt of a place to eat.
After walking around in the area we settled on the Bell In Hand tavern on Union Street.
I sampled the local draught, Bell In Hand Ale. It was dark and strong and tasty. The Bell in Hand has the distinction of being the oldest pub in the colonies as well.
Funny to think that bastards in redcoats breeches had tromped about in the alleyways where I stood. Lining Hennessey street were several other pubs.
In this area the pubs generally have glass-front panels which are folded and pushed to the side creating a large, open breezeway that keeps the bar cool and lets the din of music, bottles, and singing waft out into the street.
After a bit of a walk around this area we settled on visiting “The Tap”, which Yelp! seems to regard as an “OK bar for out of towners to get a bit of the Boston bar experience”. Lured to it by the sound of live, acoustic music, we went in and grabbed seats at the bar.
Now, if you read the Yelp! reviews, many of them make reference to a guy with an acoustic guitar….well he was there and this gentleman is known by the monniker of Bruce Jacques. Bruce is a rubber-faced, frenetic, comedian-musician who plays covers often with props or costumes that gets the crowd laughing.
A few songs in, plain musician Bruce changed into the ringleader / circus show that was to dominate the rest of the evening. Noting some men coming down the street with a bundle from Mike’s Bakery, he jumped through the window portal, microphone-in-hand and, still singing, worked in a request for cannoli which – to my surprise – he got!
Shirtless, Bruce bit the cannoli, and then proceeded to paint his nipples in cream filling much to the bar’s amusement and the young cuties’ embarrassment. After teasing them ( what young studentette can resist a bald hairy man with filling on his chest? ) he stepped on their table, stole one of the girls’ beer, and proceeded to gulp it down, and then ran back to the stage.
With these antics a few passers-by were ready to come in for a drink and see some more antics. Within 30 minutes Bruce turned the pub from a few dozen people idly watching the Sox close in on victory ( Spanked Atlanta, horribly ) to a body-packed bar of chaos. The virtuous crowd-attraction cycle continued until tons of young girls, salryguys, tourists, some locals started to fill the space.
Bruce channels Eddie Vedder
I love Bostonians. They were so fun and so relaxed. The singing was loud and raucous, unrestrained and blissful. These were people out to have a good time.
And I learnt an Irish tune: “Wild Rover” whose chorus involves clapping and involvement from the audience.
And it’s no, nay, never, (4 × clap) No nay never no more, Will I play the wild rover No never no more.
And I swear the bar was literally moving side to side during this tune.
From this point on the night falls hazily into trading gifts of Jägermeister, beers, talking about where we were from and what the “good bahs ahh” in San Francisco. This friendliness makes me think that this is how “everyone’s Irish on St. Patty’s day” – there’s a friendliness and an openness that everyone is entitled to the right to sing, drink, and have a good time with good friends.
If you’re interested in my un-scientific theory on happiness and the fuller-figure of Boston girls, you may want to see more below.
We left before closing time, but it was an excellent evening. There is but only a certain amount of sloshed beer that one can take in a given night.
Thanks for making Boston feel like home for one night for this tourist.
Note: First blog post from new MacBook Pro 
I still receive email updates for Bay Area acts. It helps me find out if said acts might be heading to Austin soon. There was this winner in the latest update.
Hilary Duff Sleep Train Pavilion
Sensible.
Tuesday night was a lot of fun in Boston. After doing the full conference raft of activities we retired back to our respective rooms for some decompression and rest.
Around 6 we headed into the borderlands to Chinatown and enjoyed a steak dinner at Smith and Wollensky. I enjoyed a bowl of their “world famous” split-pea soup and, quite possibly, the best steak I have ever had.
It was a bone-in ribeye that just knocked my socks off. I was cutting it very thinly and making my own carpaccio style cuts. It was delicious.
The restaurant was in an old armory building near Chinatown that was decorated in a very nice early-teens, Teddy Roosvelt, 48 stars kind of way.
Afterwards I returned to the hotel and had a few drinks with fellow attendees from Genentech. We’re actually in a similar space insofar as we both work in IT departments for companies whose multi-million dollar investment, per annum, results in, well, bits: 1 and 0s or one of four nucleotides ( in their case ).
I’m still not able to coerce my body out of California time. To my chagrin I wasn’t asleep until about 2. I can’t wait to get back to Austin and be with my baby. Much to my chagrin, I will be headed to San Jose this Sunday and will be there the entire week.
Hello to anyone and everyone out there.
If, by some chance, you took a look at my ridiculous looking name-badge and decided to punch my name into Google and wound up here, hi, how are you.
My morning sesion was excellent. Michael Sampson lead a session on what the skillset for a manager in a post-2.0 world would look like. The session was very exciting. Michael did an expert job of delivering slides that framed break-out mini-sessions among attendees. I very much enjoyed this meet-up. Michael seems to have enjoyed giving the presentation as well.
Thanks to all my fellow break-out group friends.
The afternoon session was a discussion of flexible “presence” technology. Maybe this seems old-hat to be because I’m a Cisco employee ( not trying to shill here ) but the notion of presence and follow me seems less-than-revloutionary.
Yesterday afternoon I took a bit of a drive and bought a new MacBook Pro 15”. The question was do i go glossy or matte. I went matte. I’ve hemmed and hawwed and simply, I just can’t get to liking the glassy. I know the colors are bright and if I looked at a lot of photos or watched DVDs all the time, I think I’d like it…but…I don’t know, I just can’t get around the reflections.
Maybe I’m just lamely old-school.
Browsers download markup / designed to take tag soup; you don’t have to make it formatted properly. SGML parsers are loose, XML parsers get valid dated in. XML parsers can produce a DOM 3-10x faster.
When writing XSLT style, you need to think functionally, not procedurally.
Don’t write so many if/thens for/each crap. Just think about applying on key terms as you come across the element you’re manipulating.
Two of my favorite seminars from SXSWi centered around typography, and specifically typography concepts applied to web design.
The first course was entitled “Grids are Good and Why you should use them” delivered by Subtraction.com’s owner Khoi Vinh and Mark Boulton. The second was entitled “Web Typography Sucks” delivered by Mark Boulton and Richard Rutter.
I highly recommend that you take advantage of the presentations that they’ve put online of these. These visual aids are great and really got me thinking about how grids could help me design better web page layouts.
I’ve not yet managed to integrate their lessons into my own theme yet ) or, if I have, I have done so unconsciously ), buuuuut think that I may try to put together a grid-based theme at some point in the future ( although I’m exceedingly loth to deal with PHP hell again any time soon ).
I’ve actually been quite inspired since I took the class and have acquired several key books on the topic:
Between these few tools, I really found my vocabulary embiggened in terms of graphic design. Much like the dreaded “blub paradox” - you don’t know that there’s a richer, more scientific, and more structured way of looking at layout and even paper itself until someone teaches you that there’s a vocabulary out there, of which you are largely ignorant, that explains something you take for granted, and which you are frequently thankful and rely upon.
Another SXSW speaker, the pre-stalker-meltdown Kathy Sierra described this as having “a higher-res experience”. She described that having worked a mixing board, she can’t go to a concert without noting when the mix is just a little bit off.
“Oh gee, just a little bit more base in the snare….”
I suppose it’s similar to the frustration I experience watching others play video games I love. I’m horrible to do this with.
“What, of course the big pile of toilet paper is what you need to roll into your Katamari next! No go in reverse about 20 revolutions, hang a….dammit why are you rolling up those rinky-dink spiders, that’s bull… ( sorry, Mom )”
Infused with a new-found love for grids and an understanding of their hidden, subtle, yet powerful ordering presence ( it’s like pyarimadine sugars that way ), I thought of one of my favorite philosophy book covers. The cover from Ricœur’s The Conflict of Interpretations by Northwestern press.
I took a scan of the page and then proceeded to add a grid to it to try to understand the layout and positioning used. To me it’s very European, very clean, very modern, and the presence of that much Helvetica adds to the sense of rationality.
Take a look at the gridded scan as I describe features.
The unit of measure seems to be squares of 16 pixels. From these pixels larger blocks are fabricated. The vertical space between the text and title area to the picture is 320pixels = 16×2×10. The space between the “y” in Phenomenology is 88 pixels to the left edge of the “I” in Interpretations. 88 is 16×5.
This is very interesting to me. As i started to look for more spaces I came to see the number 16’s central importance to this layout.
I don’t think I would have noticed, or cared that someone noticed and cared so much to lay things out as painstakingly as this. What I can say is that I’m hugely glad that those typographers at SXSWi gave this design amateur a chance to have a richer appreciation of their craft, art, and verily, science.
It’s all about √2
I’ve arrived and checked into the beautiful Westin Boston Waterfront.
I’m still on California time, so it’s almost 2am and the conference starts at 9. Ugh.
I’m going to head to bed now, after I brush my teeth.
