unwiredben

Last night, I went to a debate viewing party out in Manhattan with some of Annelies' law school friends.  It was a lot of fun, and we headed back to Brooklyn via the subway.  The B train was taking forever to get to the West 4th station, so we grabbed the second F train, since it stops about twelve blocks from our apartment.

We got some seats, and there was a man sitting next to us that looked very familiar, but I dismissed it.  The train got delayed while police were called to remove someone from the tracks up ahead, and while we were waiting, the man asked if we were from Austin.  I guess the KOOP radio t-shirt and SXSW bag gave me away.  I said yes, and asked him if he was Jerm Pollett, and he said yes.  It was very surprising.

Jerm has been around Austin for a while with several notable projects including the band The Total Foxes and the comedy group The Sinus Show.  I first started going to his productions almost ten years ago and usually had a really good time, so it was weird but cool to be talking with him in the middle of a subway tunnel in New York.  Annelies and I introduced ourselves, I named dropped <lj user="poyboy"> and the Show With No Name, and I found out that he'd just arrived in town that day and was looking for a room to rent. We couldn't help with that, but we did give him some suggestions for some theater spaces that might be amenable to doing his kind of comedy.  Alas, I found out the sad truth about the lack of an Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn; there's a long-standing New York City law that prohibits a movie theater from selling alcohol.  I think I'm going to write some letters soon!

Anyway, it was very cool to see a fellow recent Austin-to-New-York transplant. I look forward to seeing what he does with his comedy career up here, and hope we get to hang out sometime.

One of the first things people notice when they visit my house is my huge shelves of DVDs. I've collected quite a few since I bought my first disc back in 1999, and with my pending move to Brooklyn, I've got to get rid of a large number of them. I've got my collection divided into those I keep, those I put online for sale (mostly via my bencombee account on half.com), and those that aren't worth putting online because they don't fetch very much.  Right now, there's about 250 discs in that "don't fetch much" collection.

Here's where you come in.  If you live here in the Austin area and think you might want to pick up some discs, let me know via email or comments and I can setup an appointment for you to come over and graze.  I'm charging $1 a DVD or $10 for a dozen,  There's a lot of crap, but there are also a lot of good movies that just happen to be have really big print runs.  What I don't sell will probably be sold bulk to a place like Cheapo where you'd have to pay $5 for the same movie.

My taste in films favors a lot of comedies and indie films, with a smattering of action and sci-fi.  You've probably heard of a good chunk of what I've got for sale, and just think, you could own it for less than it costs to rent it from a chain video store.

I may make a list for online peeps, but not until my local friends get a chance to check things out.

I'm not much of a sports fan. The last time I went to a professional sporting event was probably when I was in college and attended an Atlanta Braves game with my dad and sister. I remember reading a copy of "The Psychology of Computer Programming" in the stands for one of my CS classes, but I have no no idea who the Braves were playing or what the final score was. Earlier then that, I'd occasionally go with my dad to Atlanta to watch Georgia Tech football; the thing I remember most isn't the game, but the electronic scoreboard with the primitive animations to rile up the crowd or get them to go to various local restaurants.

So, with that background, it was odd to find myself and Annelies at a baseball stadium last night watching the Round Rock Express play the Albuquerque Isotopes. I got free tickets from my financial advisor, and I knew that Annelies liked baseball, so we went. It was actually nice; they had rented a suite where there were free refreshments, and our seats were near first base. The heat wasn't too bad with an occasional breeze. There were even moments of tension as we watched foul balls soar over our heads to land in the stands nearby.

In the end, the Express won 7 to 4, with most of the action occurring in the middle innings. I got to enjoy a state-of-the-art scoreboard with video feeds and lots of animations. We even got free water bottles as part of a promotion for the Click to Empower project. I probably won't go back before the end of the summer, but I don't think I'll mind an occasional outing to see the Brooklyn Cyclones once we get moved into our new residence in September.

Most of my 34th birthday shenanigans are done now, and it's been a lot of fun, mostly thanks to my dear fiancee Annelies.

We started with a bang on Saturday with a segway tour of downtown Austin, taking our friend Kirk along with us. The tour company we chose is SegCity; they had us out for over two hours running around the city hall and capital area. The segways are a lot of fun to glide around in; you indicate your forward/backward motion based on how you shift your weight on your feet, and you turn using a handle twist on the left side. It was easy to do 360 degree turns, and getting around the ramp-filled downtown sidewalks was rarely a problem. The top speed on the units we had was 8MPH, so you were never going dangerously fast.

After that, we attempted to get people to mini-golf at Peter Pan's, but it was just too hot. Annelies showed off her ironing skill by making a "Happy Birthday Unwired Ben" t-shirt since she wasn't able to get my name on the sign outside. So, we went early to Hula Hut and had delicious Polynesian/Tex-Mex food under air conditioning. Then a few of us went to the Dart Bowl for a game where we all proved that we're not the world's best bowlers. I didn't break 100 (so sad).

My last big birthday activity was last night when Annelies took me to Wink Restaurant, downtown on Lamar. They improvised a delicious vegetarian tasting menu using lots of local produce, including some great potato gnocchi and a pleasingly contrasty cheese plate.

There are a few pictures of Sunday's fun on the Flickr set linked to the photo.

I just found this article about the future of movie theaters and there's a particularly useful bit of info:

At Alamo Drafthouse, an 11-year-old Austin-based chain with seven locations, every other row of seats has been replaced with café tables, and customers can write orders for pizza and microbrews on slips that are silently picked up by black-clad waiters. The company is in negotiations to open theaters in large markets like New York and Los Angeles by late next year, with the goal of having 200 screens by 2012.

Very exciting! Now, the NYC location, if it happens, will probably be more like Lake Creek than the Ritz, but that's still better than the usual movie experience. Very cool!

In a previous entry, I mentioned New York City as playing a major role in the upcoming year. Here's an elaboration.

My wonderful girlfriend of almost two years, Annelies, is about to head to Africa for her last semester of law school. She's going over to Tanzania to work with the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, leaving in late January and returning in May. She'll be stationed in Arusha, the large city near Mt. Kilimanjaro. I'm planning on traveling out to Africa at the end of her internship and spend a little time there with her before she returned to the US.

While she's gone, I'll have lots of work to finish for Palm, plus in March, I'll have the 2008 SXSW festival. I'm doing the Palm OS schedule again, although I hope that we got enough infrastructure changes into the program last year so that we don't have to add more hacks to deal with the ever increasing number of events.

The next two months will be spent with Annelies preparing for the New York State bar, which is at the end of July. She'll be able to study for it here in Austin, but she'll have to fly up to Rochester to actually take the two-day exam. She won't know the results for a while after that.

I've also got my sister's wedding to attend at the end of July. I get to be a groomsman, and I really like her fiance.

After that, we'll start our rental search in NYC. We want to find a nice place in Brooklyn near the main subway line that goes to her law firm in Manhattan where she has a job waiting for her in their litigation department. Since I already work remotely for Palm, I expect that I'll continue to work for them once I move; the big change will be that my flights to California will take a few more hours each way and I'll have to deal with lousy JFK instead of the more hospitable AUS. At least I can do a red-eye back to New York.

We're planning on not having a car up there. Going car-less worked well for us this summer during our trial run; we rented a car once to go to an out-of-town wedding, and almost every place delivers there, although we might have to rent out a truck for a day to do some IKEA and Costco runs.

The move will happen sometime in August or early September. I'm excited about my new adventures up in the big city, but I'm also sad that I'll be leaving Austin as my home. However, Austin won't leave my heart; I'm already planning on coming back every March for SXSW as long as I'm able. I've still got a while here, including some time where I'll be on my own, so I'm going to take advantage of as much of the city as I can before I leave.

As part of a week of having the parents here in Austin, I took off a day from work, Annelies skipped her classes, and we headed on a road trip out to see some small Texas towns.

It started with coffee at Genuine Joe's in North Austin. While sitting on the patio, we saw one of Austin's wild parrots in the tree above my head. It was dropping some berries on me and had bright green plumage.

We headed down IH-35 to visit Gruene, Texas next. Officially part of New Braunfels, this little town sits on the Comal River and has a number of neat antique shops, gift shops, and restaurants. We saw some firepots shaped like pigs for grilling, and ended up going to the Gristmill Restaurant for lunch and a view of the river. I had a really nice poblano pesto pasta salad along with some jalapeno and cabbage slaw, and the other members of my party were pretty satisfied with their dishes. After lunch, I found some old issues of the Journal of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the antique shop that I picked up, and after a visit to the general store, we headed back north.

Rather than track 35 all the way back, we took state road 21 out to Lockhart, Texas. While it's famous for its BBQ, we enjoyed its historic courthouse as well as some locations that were used in the movie "Waiting for Guffman".  We got some drinks at the Javamotion coffee shop, then sat outside and watched the cold front come in, with the temperatures dropping 10 degrees while we were outside.

It was fun.  I got to see some nearby places I'd never been, and we all got to hang out more.  I'm about to head out to pick up my sister from the airport, tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and the cooking has already started in full force with my spicy green beans resting in the fridge.

For a few days, I'm back in Austin... there's more travel coming soon, but nothing that will have me away for months at a time.

It's been a bit odd getting readjusted to life in suburbia. The distance from my house to the nearest shop (the Texan Mart) is about seven NYC city blocks, and the shop is far inferior to most of the not-so-great delis that were on Broadway or Amsterdam. Less foot traffic means fewer sales which means less selection and higher prices which means the store isn't very attractive. The distance between here and the closest eatery is about twelve blocks, and that's either the not-very-veggie Cool River or the not-that-great Bear Creek, and both of those require long walks through parking lots filled with cars that don't know what to do with pedestrians.

On the other hand, I've been really enjoying the local food that I've gotten to by car since arriving: Food Shui, Kerbey Lane, Alamo Drafthouse, Chuy's, and TacoDeli! I also got a jar of homemade pickles in the mail from my friend Jessi yesterday... I had a few last night, and they're spicy and delicious. I had some good food up there, but I like things better here.

Since I won't be in town next week, I decided to make last night my last visit to the soon-to-be-gone Alamo Drafthouse Downtown. They're shutting down next Wednesday, and while they will open a new location at the historic Ritz theater on Sixth Street later this summer, it won't be the same. The downtown location has lots of good memories for me -- it's where we did our Show With No Name live shows, it's where I saw the first friends-and-family screening of "Dear Pillow", and it's where I saw through many great SXSW films and Q&As.

It was a good evening, starting with the AV Geeks show "Why We're Fat", a collection of industrial films made by food marketing groups featuring everything from industrial baking of white bread to recipes for potato chips courtesy of some very stereotypical leprechauns. It was a fun show, especially the audience-participation bit at the start where we all got to read a frame from an old filmstrip.

After that was the last downtown Open Screen Night. I'd not been to one before, but I liked what I saw. Basically, anyone can bring something to show, but the audience can gong it off-screen after two minutes. The selections ranged from senior film projects to music videos to a bunch of prank videos that started off one way, then cut into some sort of scene with lots of wee people dancing. There was a submission called "Thar She Blows" then ended up being a scene from a particularly adult movie; it was removed after the two minute mark, but a particularly loud and drunk woman kept requesting it over and over from the back of the room. Ultimately the winner of the evening was a production called "Choose Your Own Death" which was a DVD about a psycho killer where you kept having to choose what would happen next in the scene. If you got to the end of a set of choices and were killed, a floating "DEAD" would appear up on the screen. I preferred the "Pipe World Parables" film where a guy used techniques learned from old Nintendo games to save the day; the production values were low, but it was pretty creative.

I decided not to stay for the Weird Wednesday; 270 minutes of film programming was enough for one night. As I left, I said goodbye to the old place, but I look forward to more interesting Alamo programming this fall.

Last night, I headed down to the Alamo downtown for a double feature. At 7pm, Austin mayor Will Wynn was doing his own version of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" presentation, then at 9pm, the Master Pancake guys were doing a take on the horrible 2004 disaster movie, "The Day After Tomorrow".

Wynn was a good speaker. About half of the presentation was pretty familiar to people who've see Gore's film version. There was an intro video clip by the Blue Man Group, plenty of pictures of ice and forests, and the dramatic "what's flooded if the seawater rises" shots. However, Wynn had customized the presentation for the Austin audience, and there was a lot of detail about Austin's own energy use (primarily transportation and home/office use), our energy production (roughly 40% coal, 30% natural gas, 20% nuclear, 10% alternative), and what plans the city has in place. Austin will make a big different because it's the country's fastest growing big city, having jumped from around 22th to 14th in size in the last decade, and it's also the most advanced in several areas, such as solar rebates and alternative energy production. The city has joined about 500 others in the US to endorse the Kyoto accords, and we've got some radical plans to give residents better information about energy consumption, such as allowing you to look at a property's power bill history so you can compare efficiency when looking for a house or apartment. For more information, you can view the highlights of the Austin Climate Protection Plan.

Wynn did a Q&A after, and there were some great questions. One audience member asked why we weren't mandating better nozzles at gas pumps to reduce vapor emissions. Apparently, we can't as cities are forbidden from imposing those rules until they actually violate the Clean Air Act, and while Austin has gotten close, we've taken active measures to avoid actually violating it, which means we can't use some remedies to make things better. Another question was about how its unsafe for bike to many locations in town; Wynn talked about his committee with Lance Armstrong to identify better bike paths and also said they were working on a route planning website that would use accident and traffic information to help riders plan safer routes.

The entertainment part of the night was another Master Pancake show. The guys came on stage at the start in Al Gore and GW masks, and they had a pretty good and loose skit about Bush's new "realization" about global warming featuring a smoke machine as "Foggy", the new administration spokesfog. Their jokes during the film were good; it's great to make fun of a movie that is so bad yet takes itself so seriously. With Jake Gyllenhaal playing a starring role, there was plenty of "Donnie Darko" and "Brokeback Mountain" references, but I chuckled the loudest at the jabs at KUT's Larry Monroe made when a certain character that has a resemblance to the DJ came on screen. It's too bad this was a one time show; it was a much better match for them than last month's "Pretty Woman".

Thursday, I didn't do much during the day but stay home and work.  That evening, I picked up my friend Charlie from the airport, we had a delicious dinner at Hao Hao, then headed to the Alamo South Lamar for a few films:

The Pipe - a really funny short by my friend Dan Brown about a paramedic and security guard who have the overnight shift watching an air pipe that's part of a radio station stunt.

Murder Party - dark horror comedy about New York City hipsters/artists who throw a party where they'll kill the guest for their art.  It got too bloody and gruesome for me at times, but I really liked their approach and many of their jokes worked really well.

Severance - British horror film about an office retreat that turns into a flee-the-insane-soldiers hunt.  Again, I found a lot of it funny, but it also was very brutal at times.  I just don't go for gore or for lots of on-screen violence.

On Friday, Charlie and I did a quick Fry's Electronics run, then headed down to pick up Annelies.  We had lunch at Trudy's, found a primo parking spot on Congress, then headed over to the Convention Center to see Flatstock, the big concert poster convention.  After that was a day show where we caught the end of the band Aquaduct's performance when they covered the "Walker, Texas Ranger" theme song.

After that, we caught three films:

"Skillz Like This" - stylistic comedy about a dejected writer who discovers that he can rob banks and stores, and about how he and his friends deal with his new notoriety.  Funny and charming.

"Eagle vs. Shark" -- really cute New Zealand comedy with the Jermain from Flight of the Conchords and a cute female lead playing geeks that fall in love.  There's a lot of "Napoleon Dynamite" in the characters, but the female role was much better realized here, and it was always quite funny.  My favorite comedy of the fest, I think.

"Fay Grim" -- Hal Hartley's sequel to "Henry Fool" is a very different movie; Fay's character is the centerpiece of this complex tale of international espionage, and there's a pile of plot.  However, it worked very well for me, and I loved the bits that referenced the ambiguity of the previous film.  The many out-of-US locations were very well used, and I loved Hal's use of text in some of the scene changes.  Parker Posey does very fine work here.

I'm actually working today (on a conference call as I type), at least until mid-afternoon when I head down to conference center to observe the fun that's the music fest.

Yesterday was a light day for movies.  The only one Annelies and I saw was "The Chances of the World Changing", a PBS documentary about a guy who rescued over 1000 turtles, including many endangered or almost-extinct species, and was keeping them in his New York City penthouse.  He wants to start a research center to preserve species of turtle for eventual reintroduction into the wild, but his plans keep falling through and he gets more and more depressed over a five-year timespan.  I liked the doc, but it suffered from being about 20 minutes too long.  Maybe they'll edit it more before it airs on the POV program on PBS.

I worked in the afternoon, then headed out for dinner at Stalite with Patrick, Tiffany, and Annelies.  It was quite good, and the one veggie entree was a fancy portabella mushroom lasagna with gnocci.  The desserts were pretty good, although I liked the presentation more than the flavor.  There were lots of good conversations.

Then, Patrick and Tiffany and I headed out to the music fest.  First band was Austin's local Oh No! Oh My! who played good music that constantly reminded me of other popular bands (Arcade Fire, Frank Ferdinand, Modest Mouse).  After that was Pony Up, a young female quartet from Montreal who did a song I kept hearing on Pandora that I liked called "Matthew Modine".  I really liked their show, but the acoustics at Flamingo Cantina were quite poor, and they never played their "hit".

The next performance was Lily Allen at Stubb's.  The show was at capacity, but Patrick and Tiffany had gotten into line earlier, so I was able to get in with them as the gradually let in more people.   We only saw the first half, but it was a lot of fun, with Lily claiming to be drunk and cursing out the show sponsor, NME, calling them obscene names and saying she wouldn't have played here if she'd known they were behind it.

The last music of the night was an Irish singer/songwriter named Damien Dempsey.  This was a really nice set with him performing with a full band in an intimate club setting.  I really liked a soulful song about the evil of European colonialization with a proper Irish rant at the end.  The show was helped by a number of Irish fans in the audience that were able to sing along with the faster songs.

SXSW is half-over!  It was another good day of festival going.  I started out by heading downtown to meet Annelies and her mom as Las Manitas Avenue Cafe for a plate of migas, then I took a much needed nap before heading to lunch and our first film, the documentary "Manufacturing Dissent", a critical look at Michael Moore.  It was quite even-handed and the filmmakers were conflicted about Moore -- they liked the energy that he brings to the left, but had big problems with how he bent the truth in his documentaries and always tended to push things that helped him personally over those that benefited the cause.  I really liked it, and I think it's a good piece for any fans of Moore's work.

We then hid at a coffee shop for an hour waiting for the rain to pass before heading downtown to party hop.  The interactive closing party at The Foundation was a snooze, but the film closing party at Maggie Mae's was a bit better.  It actually had food, and Fox (the sponsor), handed out gift bags with a "Family Guy" mousepad, a "The Winner" t-shirt, and a "Simpsons" noise box that reproduced the sayings of Homer.

We closed the day with the world premiere of the film "A Lawyer Walks into a Bar" at the Paramount.  It's a doc about six people taking the California bar exam, and it was great.  The audience was filled with lawyers and law students, giving the screening a real strong energy.  The material was handled with a humorous tone that worked really well, and the characters all had things that made them sympathetic to the audience.  The look was very polished too, and there were both winners and losers at the end.  Definitely a good film that should be seen by anyone who wants to learn more about how our system of law works.

Tomorrow: a movie about a guy who has over a thousand turtles in his apartment.

Five hours ago, I ate two vegan tacos from the Nuclear Taco tent at SXSW Interactive.  I didn't quite know what to expect, so I got one "hot" and one "nuclear".  I found them both to be very, very spicy, but after an ice cream bar to cleanse my palette, I thought I would be OK.

Nope.

Annelies and I rushed over to the Ritz Lounge to catch the Heather Gold Show, a live talk show where she was bringing people on stage to talk about "continuous partial attention", a state where you don't focus on one thing, but instead divide your attention among several task all the time.  It was an interesting talk with some good jokes, but it was plagued by mike problems that made it hard to hear the panelists over the background noise.

It went on for almost two hours, and by the end, I felt I needed to go to the bathroom.  On my way back, my stomach started turning upside down, a little pocket of pain in my belly, and I knew something had to be done.  Ani quickly caught on to my plight, and we headed back towards the convention center.  I didn't think I'd make it, so we ducked into the lobby of the Residence Inn and I ran to the bathroom.  I came out about fifteen minutes later, and she went to get my car from the garage to take me to her mom's house to rest.  I left there about 11, feeling well enough to drive, but still really poor.

Other news: "Cat Dancers" was quite good, a documentary about a couple that was one of the first to train and perform with exotic cats.  It ended up being a pretty tragic story, but there were also some laughs.  We wanted to see "Smiley Face", but my sick stomach prevented that.  Annelies' mom saw "Knocked Up", the new Judd Apatow film, and said it was great; I'll catch it in June when it plays wide.

I started out this morning early, getting down to the convention center by 9AM to go to the green room to prep for my panel, "Designing for Convergent Devices".  I was surprised by the large turn out of geeks at the early hour of 10AM after the DST switch.  The panel went quite well; we ran over a few minutes and there were a few tech glitches that we were able to overcome through flash drives and laptop sharing, but I got to show the SXSW app and talk about our design issues, and we had a good discussion.

Films today were hit and miss:  my first outing was a batch of shorts by two of Austin's film-making brother teams, the Zellner's and the Duplass's.  It was all done wrestling style in front of a packed Alamo South screening room, with firecrackers, man thongs, glittery boas, and a girl with a placard all participating in the fun.  After that, I got an amazing parking spot on Congress and zoomed over to the convention center for the documentary "Does Your Soul Have a Cold?" about depression in Japan.  It just depressed me and made me frequently check my phone to see when it would be over.

After that was a quick dinner at Rio Grande, the Mex place that took over the Real World Austin house, the a sprint to the line at the Paramount for "Hannah Takes the Stairs" where Annelies was waiting for me.  This is the new film by Joe Swanburg, and it continued his successful run of honest relationship-based films with a really great cast of collaborators.

Following the film, we got drinks and free t-shirts in black Chinese take-out boxes at the IFC party at Light Bar, then headed away from downtown amid heavy rain and thunder.

Tomorrow: panels in the morning and afternoon, followed by The Heather Gold Show at the Ritz at 7PM, and maybe "Smiley Face" at the Paramount at 10 if we're up to it.

This morning, I saw "The King of Kong", a really great documentary about Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebie, two men competing for the world record score in the classic arcade game Donkey Kong.  It was a wonderful story, full of struggle between good and "questionable".  Steve was there for the QA along with the doc crew, and the audience gave him a standing ovation for his achievement.

The afternoon film was "TWISTED: A Balloonamentary", a look at balloon twisters, their gatherings, and their life stories.  I really liked the amazing sculptures that they made, but the film itself was a bit too scattered, shallowly covering a lot of people instead of focusing on a few stories.  I did find myself crying a lot at the end (a key figure in the twisting world died while the film was being shot), but it was mostly sympathetic tears.

After that was a short, "Scenic Highway", about Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  Fun fact: the capitol building there doubled as the UT tower in a film shot in the 70's about the Charles Whitman shootings.  That played with the feature documentary "Fish Kill Flea" about a flea market in New York that closes -- it was OK, but not really very memorable, IMO.

I had dinner at Noodle-ism with my fellow panelists so we could get ready for the morning's session on designing for convergent devices, then Annelies ran into Patrick and Tiffany and I joined up with the three to hang out before they went to see "Big Rig".

Tomorrow: panel in the morning, films all afternoon and evening.  Yeah!

Today was Annelies' first day as a SXSW attendee, and fun was had by all.

Registration took about 90 minutes -- a half hour of standing in line for the panelist desk, followed by getting the big bags and then searching for my contact to get some film passes as part of the trade agreement for doing the Palm app.

We then dropped off a pass at Annelies's mom's house, looked through the bags, filled up a recycling bin with useless magazines and flyers, and headed down to the Alamo South Lamar for the evening's films.

First was the Canadian feature "Monkey Warfare" with Don McKellar (yeah!).  It's about a couple who scavenge garage sales and dumpsters for relics to sell online.  They try to lead an anonymous existence, but Don meets up with a young pot dealer who he turns on to radical movements of the 60's.  There's some nice relationships explored here, and it turned out quite nicely.

After that, we grabbed dinner at Souper Salad and returned to the Alamo for our next three films:

"Alive and Well" was a funny short starring Neil Flynn (the janitor on "Scrubs").  It's about a plane crash with a badminton team and one slightly crazy pilot that wants to immediately resort to cannibalism.

"American Zombie" was the standout film of the night.  A mock documentary about high-functioning zombies in Los Angeles, and very well done.  The gag with a zombie spritual meeting was a real highlight, and we got swag after the film: grey DEADSTRONG bracelets.

"The Trailer Park Boys Movie" made me angry that I'd stayed up until midnight to watch a very formula comedy that relied way to much on the audience being familiar with the characters from the Canadian TV show.  I only laughed a couple of times and mostly found it tedious.

About to go to sleep now.  Tomorrow: "King of Kong" about video game competitors, another doc about balloon animals, a doc about flea markets, and hopefully, a party or two.

Details on my panel at SXSW have finally been posted to the web.  If you want to learn more about with whom I'll be presenting, check out the entry for "Designing for Convergent Devices".

BTW, work on this year's Palm OS app is coming along nicely.  We've got all the new data in place and most of the graphics have been refreshed.  Now that Interactive has their data updated, we're getting close to the first public release.

I finally get to join some of my illustrious filmmaker friends like poyboy and senorjacob this year by participating in SXSW 2007 as a panelist.  I'm in a session called "Designing for Convergent Devices" that will be Sunday, March 11th at 10am somewhere in the Austin Convention Center.  I'm representing Palm on the panel and will be talking about my experiences doing software for the Treo and taking advantage of its wireless network access and multimedia capabilities.  The panel also includes Jeff Beckham from AT&T, Steve Hoffman of Zannel, David Richard from  Design for Use, and Denise Burton from frog design.

Of course, I'm also doing the Palm application again this year.  I'm not sure who the sponsor will be for this version.  I keep hoping it will be a simple update, but something always seems to come up, requiring a bit of software rework.  Last year, it was the ever increasing number of bands forcing a database rework.  This year I expect to spend some time getting both Kinoma and Pocket Tunes working for streaming media; the Treo 700p has enough bandwidth on the EVDO networks to support video over-the-air if it is encoded right.