unwiredben

Three films tonight, ranging from great to irritating to offensive.

First, the great "Goliath" by the Zellner Brothers. This plays again during SXSW on Wednesday night at the Convention Center and during the day on Saturday at the Paramount, and if you're in Austin, you should try to go to a show. It's a character study of a guy who loses his wife, then finds his cat missing. He gets frustrated, tries to find the cat, gets demoted at work, and misplaces his anger on other people. At times sad, but often very funny, I really enjoyed this film.

Second, appropriately, was the well-promoted "Second Skin", a documentary about MMORPG players. It covered a lot of topics, ranging from romance, addiction, family life, suicide, gold farming, and enabling the handicapped. It really reached too far, and it felt really long even though it was only 90 minutes. They should have cut some of the material and expanded on one topic, instead of trying to be the "everything" documentary on online gaming.

Third was the midnight screening of "Otis", a horror film about a kidnapper that tortures women that tried to be a comedy and a satire. I only put it on my schedule because one of the stars was Illeana Douglas, who I loved in "Grace of my Heart" and the TV show "Action!". It didn't succeed; it had a bad streak of misogyny in the first half, followed by a revenge sequence that tried to be wacky but was way too obvious. The acting by most of the cast was good, but the material repeated itself and didn't work in any way that would provoke laughter. At an abstract level, you can say that the second half was like the situation in Iraq with the family doing awful things based on bad intelligence, but the whole setup doesn't play into that storyline at all. Don't see this. Luckily, it won't have a theatrical run, being slated for a direct-to-video release.

Tomorrow: lots of panels, a film about kids who are wizards, a film about war profiteers, and Harold and Kumar. Maybe even a party or two.

Here's my first attempt to do a comic using the new tool BitStrips that's being beta-tested at SXSW:



Obviously, I didn't quite have time to write anything significant for this one. Maybe I'll do more of them as the week progresses.

Tech Note: I couldn't use their embed code with Livejournal, as they're not on the allowed-list yet. So, I used the "send a strip" feature to mail it to me, then used the image URL in the email for display purposes. I hope this keeps working.

I hadn't said anything publicly here about the 2008 SXSW schedule application, but I guess it's time to make a quick announcement. Patrick and I have not done a version for 2008. We wanted to do one, but changes in the SXSW internal database meant that we weren't going to have access in time to get things working.

In the meantime, the best alternative that I've seen is the website http://sched.org/, although their mobile support isn't so great -- you can view your schedule page OK using Blazer on the Treo, but getting more info or editing doesn't work because of the primitive JavaScript support on the browser.

If you want to see our schedule next year, let me know in the comments here, and also send a friendly note to webmaster@sxsw.com telling them you miss it. Thanks!

My panel from South by Southwest is finally online for your listening pleasure. You can get it from the SXSW site at http://2007.sxsw.com/blogs/podcasts.php/2007/08/08/designing_for_convergent_devices. It's not great entertainment, but I'm glad it's available and archived.

Right now, I'm out at LinuxWorld, about to go join my collegues on the show floor for the second day of the event. I fielded lots of Foleo questions yesterday, despite being sick with a cold. I'm still somewhat sick today, but I'm a trooper.

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.

Version 6.1 of the SXSW schedule is now online at the SXSW web site.  This version updates a lot of information for the music fest, and also adds a couple of small features.  You can now use the space bar to select or deselect items from your "My SXSW" list, and while you're viewing that list, you can send it as a memo to another device.  This is probably the last version of the program for this year.

Jeff, the moderator, has a post about the panel at his weblog with links to a few bloggers who covered it.  The most detailed coverage is at In Transit, but unfortunately SXSW messed up the panelist signage, so I'm identified as Hoffman and Adam, the CEO of Zannel, is identified as me.

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.

I'm pleased to announce that version 6.0.0 of the SXSW schedule app for 2007 is now live at http://2007.sxsw.com/pda/.  I'd like to thank my co-conspirator Patrick Sullivan for his hard work on adapting the data for another year, including some description text squeezing this afternoon in order to get all the films to fit in our 64K limit.  If you've got a Palm OS device, please download it and try it out, and let me know if you see any problems, or if you just like everything about it.

The big feature updates this year are support for Google Maps (you can jump to that program from the venue details to find where things are) and support for using the media player on the Treo 680 and 700p to playback MP3 files.  There are a few small tweaks too.  Enjoy!  

I hadn't expected the Daylight Savings Time change in 2007 to affect any of my work directly.  However, earlier this week, I found myself looking at a SXSW schedule and wondering why all the events on Sunday were starting an hour later than expected.  It ends up being a glitch because we store timestamps in the database using UTC and we only ever had to add a few hours to turn them into the local Austin times.  Well, this year, since we "spring forward" in the middle of SXSW week, on some days the local time is UTC+6, while on the rest, local time is UTC+7.  It ended up only being a small change to handle this, although I had to touch several parts of the application to get all the dates right.

I'm excited about the other changes: I've got Google Maps support working nicely, and I've added the option to download MP3 files through the web browser in addition to playing them through Pocket Tunes Deluxe.  We've got the graphics all updated for this year's look and feel, and I think I'll be sending a build to SXSW in the morning for their approval.

I was just glancing at the videos in this year's SXSW music video program, and I'm excited to see another entry from folkie-pop singer Laura Veirs.  Last years entry for "Galaxies" was one of my favorite videos and songs of 2006, and I played the album, "Year of Meteors" non-stop for a couple of weeks.  Her entry this year is "Secret Someones" off the same album, shot in Super 8 while on her US tour. 

Things I love about this video:

• The song is really catchy
• It starts out in Austin, Texas (and I knew that even before I saw the shot of Emo's)
• It makes effective use of low-res film

She's got a new album coming out next month.  It is so going on my wishlist.

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.

My friend Matt Dentler, programmer for SXSW Film, has links to the Burger Hut trailers from SXSW 2002 on YouTube at his IndieWire blog.  These are definitely my favorite film intros that SXSW has used; the 2006 series with the IFC 3D animation was lackluster, while the 2005 Bob Odenkirk intros had promise, but ended up being too repetitive with only two versions (Ron!.... Ron!).  I hope they can get back to using our local film talent to do neat things in 2007.