b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Tuesday, March 8, 2005
An Austin Geek's Guide to Getting Over Yourself at SxSW
I leave Friday for a fun-filled weekend at SxSW. I grew up in Texas and love Austin, but this will be my first time at the conference, so I was glad to find (via BoingBoing) Austin geekster David Nunez' guide to getting over at the show. David doesn't pull any punches and has some great tips. If you're going it's worth reading the whole thing:The unofficial geek guide to getting over yourself at SxSW Interactive 2005
Here's how you can tell if you have not had the full SxSWi experience:
You find yourself back in your hotel room for the rest of the night right after the last panel of the day. You haven't shaken hands with people who look and act nothing like you You haven't had dinner with complete strangers. You've stuck only to your clique of people that you see daily back at your hometown. You haven't attended the EFF / EFF-Austin / Creative Commons Party on Monday night (free drinks! free food! live music! delicious food! (I should know, I'm responsible for getting it)) You left Austin without fifty business cards of new contacts you expect to email at somepoint soon. You left Austin without the intention of calling 3 new contacts to meet up within 2 weeks of getting home You haven't crashed every clique you see You aren't smiling and smiling BIG You are talking more than listening, You haven't had a conversation or at least said "hi" to me, David Nunez. You don't have an orange, happy face sticker on your badge.
David has a great section on 'disconnecting' - you know, stopping all that IM'ing, e-mailing, and generally annoying keyboarding all the time - and talking with 'right here, right now' people. That's really why I'm going - to meet new people, stretch out a bit, get a little outside my comfort zone. So if you plan to go let me know and we'll connect. Should be a blast.
Here's a helpful list of restaurants around Austin. I have some dietary restrictions so the site is geared toward that, but it looks like a really good listing of local restaurants with reviews by people who have been there.
Posted by: 
Terry Frazier at 7:39 PM
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Categories: Collaboration, Productivity, Technology
Terry Frazier at 7:39 PM
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Whiteboard Photo Capture Software
Say that last photo looked pretty bad, huh? Have a look at Polyvision's Whiteboard Photo software. The before/after photos are slick. It's a little pricey at $249, but can be used to correct all sorts of images that suffer from perspective distortion, glare, etc. I hear college kids are using it to clean up scans of their text books without having to cutoff the spines.
Posted by: Terry Frazier at 2:27 PM
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Categories: Productivity, Technology
Terry Frazier at 2:27 PM
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Thursday, January 27, 2005
Adobe Acrobat 7
I've just installed version 7 of Adobe Acrobat, the best-selling tool for creating Adobe's proprietary PDF (portable document format) files. PDFs have some nifty uses but most of its functions don't interest me. There are also some things I really don't like -- such as putting PDFs on the web when an HTML file will do the job just as well and with a lot less hassle. I hate clicking an unmarked URL that suddenly clogs up my browser with Acrobat (excuse me, Adobe) Reader and starts hogging memory and cpu cycles. But I digress.
With Version 7 Adobe has, at long last, made a much-needed feature available to anyone with the free Adobe Reader -- commenting. This is a big deal. Sending MSWord files to clients is a terrifying experience and yet, if you're going to have clients or colleagues review a document in progress you have had little choice.
It is inconceivable to me that Microsoft thinks it's a good idea to have a word processing program with no definitive way to remove all hidden and meta data. But they've done (and continue to do) stupider things.
Having deleted or hidden data show up in a file at someone else's desktop can be embarrassing. If you work in highly political, confidential, or competitive situations the effects of such "accidents" can be devastating. Adobe has finally recognized this problem as a market opportunity. With Acrobat 7 they have made it possible to create a PDF file with commenting enabled so that anyone using Adobe Reader 7 can delete text, insert text, or simply add editorial comments. When finished the entire PDF can be sent back to the originator or, even better, the comments can be exported into a separate file. The originator can combine comment files from multiple reviewers and import them back into MSWord to form the basis of revisions. This is a substantial improvement over the old "track changes and pray" routine inherent in MSWord document reviews.
Getting this capability isn't cheap. You have to buy the $400 Professional version of Acrobat to get it. But at least it's a one-time expense. Anyone using Reader 7 can then become part of the editorial review cycle. If you're in the consulting business or have to worry about sanitizing docs before they go out for review this is definitely something you want to check out.
Posted by: Terry Frazier at 2:40 PM
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Terry Frazier at 2:40 PM
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Thursday, January 13, 2005
Blog Posting Options
I've been playing around with blog posting tools today, trying to find something that is reliable, convenient, and fits into my daily work routine. Far too often I have spent considerable effort composing a post only to have some fluke or random crash wipe it out. This pisses me off. Integration with RSS readers is problematic. Reliability is lacking. Maybe I hit the "Back" button in the browser accidentally, or maybe my weblog editor BlogJet just crashes for no good reason (it does this regularly). Or maybe I start the post in an e-mail or text editor and just get tired of clicking back and forth to get URLs. Whatever, I find that I often don't blog because of this frustration.Conversant has as many entry points as any blogging tool I've used -- an online WYSIWYG editor, a full-featured e-mail interface, an NNTP interface, and XML-RPC APIs that support Blogger, MetaWeblog, MoveableType, etc. That's not the problem. My problem is one of reliable, convenient, offline composition for complex posts.
Online editors are fine (Conversant uses the htmlarea editor), as long as you're online. And as long as you don't accidentally hit the "Back" button or do some other stupid thing that wipes out the last 20 minutes of your writing. NNTP is kinda cool except no one uses that anymore -- the idea came from Jon Udell's out of print book "Practical Internet Groupware" (still available on Safari, I think.) External blog editors, well, they're a flaky lot to say the least. I've learned my lesson about using them for anything more than simple, quick posts. E-mail is the best, IMO, but doesn't solve the RSS integration and ease of use problems.
Today I tried composing in HTML in MS Outlook 2003 and found it unsatisfactory. Maybe I'll learn more about Outlook's HTML capabilities as I go, but I suspect it isn't going to get much better than what I've seen so far -- lots of extra tags and formatting and junk and no easy way to incorporate URLs. But Outlook let's you specify MS Word as the e-mail editor, so next I moved on to trying Word. A couple of years ago I installed Simon Fells PocketXML-RPC macros for using MS Word as a blog editor. I got it working with Radio back then, but I couldn't get it working today. The macros generated some errors in Word 2003, but more importantly the HTML formatting in MS Word was really bad. No surprise there.
I don't think I'm asking that much -- a good, basic WYSIWYG HTML composition tool that fits into my daily routine, works offline, and integrates with RSS readers. I can cut and paste the end product into an e-mail using ActiveWords, so I don't need a blog editor that tries to post everything. I just want to write without obstacles.
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