Wow! “The Lookout” is one of the first movies all year that made me lean over to Lauren at the end and say “That was awesome”. I’m sorry “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Children of Men”, you both were important and worthy, but this was out and out fun and suspenseful. The main thing that I thought was great is that this may be one of the most tight scripts I’ve ever seen put to screen and that’s probably no accident as the director and writer were Scott Frank (Out of Sight, say no more). I never once had that feeling of “oh yeah, but where did he conveniently get implement X” or, “Oh yeah, the granny can handle the shotgun, sure” or “where did he conveniently become a master of kung-fu?

This morning Lauren and I got up and headed down to the convention center area and parked at the convention-side storage. We were able to park really close and then we headed in. After checking in, we needed to grab breakfast so we went to the cart onsite. 1 diet coke, 1 medium coffee, and 2 danishes cost as much as dirnner at Kerby Lane has cost the night before. I was somewhere between appalled and disgusted, it may have been the icing on the Danish. In any case, if you’re headed down here DO NOT forget to eat breakfast before you come.

Man, attending SXSW was really brutal this morning thanks to the enforced and early daylight savings time change. We woke up pretty foul and pretty tired. Last night we had attended one happy hour and had then headed down South Congress to Southside Pizza. It was a wonderful meal and there was this nice quartet of senior citizens. One of the ladies of the group touched my arm as we crossed paths and she said: You know how beautiful she is, don’t you? Of course she was referring to my beautiful, classy, elegant, and wonderful girlfriend, Miss Lauren. I answered in the affirmative to the lady and they ambled out.

I once read an interview with Bill Joy where he was talking about his creation of the vi editor. He said that it was really necessary because, at Berkeley, he was on a very slow connection and the rather heavy emacs load / execute time was just a killer. So yesterday while I was sitting in ballroom 19AB and each additional laptop brought the available bandwidth from a garden hose to a swizzle-stick, I was able to understand the wisdom. 34G 3w 5cw ESC ^ 5j DD :wq!

The amazingly lucid Mark Boulton and his colleague Richard Rutter presented this excellent ( and beautiful ) presentation on “Why Typography on the Web Sucks” ( it seems that most winning presentations have quasi-inflammatory titles ).

We got home at 0400 from a night out filled with music. I’m getting a bit homesick for my Normal Life. See you when I get back.

The Lookout See: The Lookout Wrap-Up The Prisoner, or How I Plotted to Kill Tony Blair Synopsis: On September 23, 2003, filmmaker Michael Tucker followed the U.S. Army on a house raid in Baghdad. U.S. Army intelligence became convinced that a subsequent detainee was plotting to kill British Prime Minister Tony Blair during his visit to Iraq; Abbas’s employment by British TV in Iraq may have raised this suspicion. After his arrest, Abbas, along with his two brothers, was held at Abu Ghraib and other facilities for nine months and subjected to the full menu of U.S. interrogation techniques. Recounting his experiences of fear, pain and anger, Abbas somehow retains a sense of humor.

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man Confessions of a Superhero Orphans Silver Jew Blindsight Fall from Grace The 12th was the last full day post SXSW Interactive so Lauren and I decided to camp finish off the conference with two movies ( sorry MediaTemple after-party ). After having our brain matter crammed full of AJAX and Typography and XML and Design it was time for us to catch a much more passive form of entertainment. Confessions of a Superhero A feature length documentary that chronicles the lives of three mortal men and one woman who make their living working as superhero characters on Hollywood Boulevard.

638 Ways To Kill Castro Hell on Wheels Campaign After the Wedding ( Efter brylluppet ) Trailer Park Boys Crazy Sexy Cancer Dirty Country Helvetica 638 Ways To Kill Castro Documentary about all the assassination attempts the CIA has made on Fidel Castro. Talks about Mafia collusion, Cuban dissident collusion, etc. It was interesting, but I thought that it would be better on a lazy afternoon on Discovery channel or the (old!) A&E.; Hell on Wheels Documentary about the Texas Rollergirl phenomenon ( seen at the ORIGINAL Alamo drafthouse in the company of Rick Linklater and many of the tatooed demonesses of the skatekey ).

I realize this is coming some 2 months late from the event, nevertheless, in Google, every moment of history is now, so putting these words to bits late is no crime During SXSW I saw this shirt everywhere. Congratulations Target, with this particular item you hit your target demographic square in the chest. You hit the: Post-religious, but spiritual ( Buddha ), educated ( correlate to earning power and choices elsewhere in this summation ), making enough money to have disposable income but not so much that they’d be snobby about actually buying clothes at Target, working in the tech industry, Mac-inclined, likely to have relaxed workplace clothing strictures, buys pre-faded so that machine-wash isn’t a hassle male between 21 and 35.

Here are the movies I saw, via images: The Lookout The Prisoner, or How I Plotted to Kill Tony Blair Page 1 Wrap-Up Scott Walker: 30 Century Man Confessions of a Superhero Orphans Silver Jew Blindsight Fall From Grace Page 2 Wrap-Up 638 Ways To Kill Castro Hell on Wheels Campaign After the Wedding ( Efter brylluppet ) Trailer Park Boys Crazy Sexy Cancer Dirty Country Helvetica

On March 13th my world became a little bit weirder and a little bit richer as I watched Scott Walker: 30 Century Man. It tells the story of an American boy named Noel BrelEngel, who heads to Los Angeles and joins a trio called The Walker Brothers. The Walkers have minor success in the early Sunset strip scene, but then head to Jolly Old England where their success is of a much larger and much more lucrative variety. There they seem to tap into a post-war ennui psychology that ties the bourgeois-making-tea-staring- out-the-tenement-development that defined Britain. Listening to the music you hear the heavy reverb, the Phil Spector influence overwhelming the headphones.

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 ).

Presenters Lindsey Simon Joe Orr Lindsey Simon Presentation Background Idea 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. Why XSLT should be part of you toolkit Unlike CSS you can add new elements or rearrange Easy to learn and program, if you take a functional and not a procedural approach. Fast processor is built into major browsers (IE, FF, Opera, not Safari) XML isn’t going away. The new tech of the semantic web. XSLT is the easiest way to convert the one to the other.