Photo Credits: All photos taken by Ms. Jen either with her Nokia N95 (v.1) or Dustin's Nokia N97 prototype on Sun. March 15, 2009 at the Austin Convention Center, Austin, Texas, during SXSW Interactive. Nokia N95 photos on the left column, Nokia N97 on the right. Click on first photo to start the lightbox slideshow.
Hi!
I have two mostly finished but not ready to publish posts one from Saturday on the Nokia N97 and one from yesterday on the N79, but due to client deadlines and my Mom's birthday (today!) it has been too busy to finish the posts up properly. I will do it tonight.
Sorry for what appears to be a lack of activity around here, but without Lifeblog on the Nokia N79, I can't moblog my usual photos.
Sun 03.29.09 - Photo taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N79 while out walking the dogs.
Sat 03.28.09 - Who knew one could use one's ear plugs to hold one's cigarettes? Innovative.
Photo taken by Ms. Jen on 03.28.09 with a Nokia N79 at Alex's Bar, Long Beach, CA.
Fri. 03.27.09 - Actually the Tuttle Club LA was not born yesterday, but a month ago today, though the super cheap bagels at the Library in Long Beach apparently were born yesterday.
When Steve and Lobelia Lawson were out in the LA area for the NAMM show, Steve told Geoff Hickman and myself that we should start a Tuttle Club for LA. Well, due to the busy-ness of January, February and March, I was out of the picture on any organization, but Geoff and Francine Kinzner did get on top of things and started LA/LB/OC's own social media club, modeled after London's Tuttle Club, four weeks ago on Feb. 27, 2009.
Today was the 3rd Tuttle LA, but it was my first due to my being in Arizona & Texas for the other two. I enjoyed myself. I knew 3 of the 6 folks (Jeb, Geoff, and Lauren) and got to make friends with the other 3 (Francine, Nguyen, and Mark). It was great to get out of the house and away from the computer to talk about computers, mobile, web, extra and et al, during a Friday mid-day in Long Beach.
Jeb Brilliant and I fleshed out an idea that I have had rolling around in my head for over a year now, Lauren Isaacson thought up a great domain name, and Jeb and I made a plan on how to execute the idea, all over tea and coffee at the Library on Broadway & Redondo in Long Beach. Yay!
The only downside was hanging out too long and returning to my car to find a ticket on it for parking longer than an hour. Next time - Tuttle LA #4 - I will ride my bike the 4 or so miles from Seal Beach to The Library.
Next Tuttle LA (really Tuttle LA/LB/OC):
Fri. April 10, 2009
10:30 am
@ The Library
3418 E Broadway
Long Beach, CA 90803
Thurs. 03.26.09 - This afternoon, my Mom and I walked over to Seal Beach's Main Street to try out the new Vietnamese restaurant, Phở Basil Leaf. I had been watching the arrival of a Vietnamese place with trepidation, as I am so spoiled with being less than 15 minutes away from the mecca of Vietnamese food - Westminster and Garden Grove's Little Saigon. My trepidation was further fueled by the menu that Phở Basil posted in the window of the storefront just a few buildings closer to the Seal Beach pier from O'Malley's.
The posted menu seemed to be Americanized Vietnamese. Instead of the usual Phở menu of about 10-15 different variations of beef phở, there were only four listed: beef, chicken, pork and tofu. I have never, in 25+ years, of going to authentic Vietnamese restaurants seen a tofu phở on a menu before.
As a dedicated cha gio bún (Bún chả giò) fan, to see that the only bún options were in beef, chicken, pork and tofu, made me think, "Ugh, the attack of Americanized Chinese-Vietnamese food. Ugh."
Even though Phở Basil Leaf opened over 6 weeks ago, I was waiting to try it out. Waiting for my Mom to be available, so that if the restaurant was dull and Americanized, then my Mom could not force me to go again.
Luckily for us, Phở Basil Leaf was good to surprisingly fresh. The "Summertime Spring Rolls" (as seen above) were fresh and delightful. My Mom declared them the best she has had in years, I thought they were good. My pork bún was good, but not nearly fish sauce-y or basil-y enough. My Mom liked her beef phở.
Phở Basil Leaf is good, but given the immense amount of competition within 7-15 miles, I would love to see them step up their game and aim for a wider variety of authentic Vietnamese and not just dumbed down for Seal Beach's Main Street.
Phở Basil Leaf, give me some rice wrapped pork (not chicken) chả giò for my bun with a big basil & fish sauce kick. Where is the beef phở with meatballs, beef marrow, and fish balls?
Phở Basil Leaf, challenge us. Seal Beach's Main Street is not Main Street America, but a main street in the most diverse metropolitan area in the world, we can not only handle kick ass Vietnamese, but we will drive for it.
Every butterfly and its brother must have been migrating today across the desert today. As I was driving home from Arizona about 15 miles before Desert Center on Hwy. 177 until Chiriaco Summit (about 34 miles in total) on I-10, waves and waves of butterflies were flying low across the roads and highways.
It was beautiful and sad. Beautiful to see hundreds and thousands of butterflies all at once. Sad to see so many meet their deaths on the grill of my car.
For Ada Lovelace Day, I would like to celebrate the achievements of my Cousin Lynn and the other women of her generation in tech.
According to family lore, in the early 1960s, Cousin Lynn (aka Lynn Langtry), age 19, took a administrative position at a company in Los Angeles. The company needed people to help punch out cards that ran the programs on the computer and Lynn volunteered, punching cards turned into learning how to program the computer.
From this fortuitous beginning as a programmer, in 1970, Lynn took a position with Computer Sciences Corporation, contracting for the US government, programming computers in such exotic locations as Hawaii, Alaska and Iran before the fall of the Shah.
As a child, I knew that my mom's best cousin was an adventurer and lived a secret classified life. As a teenager, when Lynn returned to California, I knew her as my mom's super cool cousin Lynn who had a job that no other woman I know had. Lynn worked for NASA! But it wasn't until I started to get involved in the web in 1994-96, that I really got to talk to Lynn about programming, tech, and computers.
One of my favorite conversations with Lynn about programming was about 2000, she was grousing about how tediuos XML seemed, in a class she was taking. She, the woman with nearly 40 years of programming experience, asked my opinion on XML. We both agreed that it was a good data structure, but felt that all the hype of the time was just hype.
Lynn has been a big supporter of my choosing a career in tech and whenever we get together at Easter or Thanksgiving we talk about what is up in the web world, even though she has been retired to a serious "career" in golf and the like for the last 5 or so years.
Given how hard it has been to take up web development and programming as a woman in the 1990s and 2000s, I greatly admire Lynn and her whole generation of women (& men) who pioneered the computer programming field, who worked hours on end in windowless basements in government buildings in Alaska, who worked programming in Tehran, who had opportunities to create a new field.
Thanks, Ada. Thanks, Lynn. Thanks to all the thousands of other women who are programmers and have been an encouragement to many women.
Mon 03.23.09 - This afternoon a group of us went offroading: Joe Hanen (on motorcycle), Joe Maxwell (on quad), Kyle Vestermark (Mr. Toad in the lead Tyrex), Cayden Vestermark (as Mole in the lead Tyrex), Christine Woods and I (in the following Tyrex). We went from Shea Road (Parker Speedway) to the Bill Williams and Planet Ranch and back in the Arizona Sonoran Desert.
It really was Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, even odder with me taking photos every 30 seconds with the Nokia N79. The photos were exported into Quicktime with iPhoto and then uploaded as a movie to Flickr.
Sun 03.22.09 - Drive out to Paker, Arizona to see la familia. Off and on raining while partly sunny in the desert. Overall, nice four hour drive, lots of grass and wildflowers in the LA/OC area, but most of the flowers were gone by the time I got to the desert.
Sat. 03.21.09 - Local mourning dove decides to nest and raise youngins in a cactus filled window box.
I hope all is well, but I am concerned about you.
March, I hate to break this to you, but you seem to be confused this year. I know that you know this and I know that I know this, and so do the other 16 million folk who have lived in SoCal for longer than a couple of years, but ...
March, June Gloom is *supposed* start in June, or mid-May at earliest. Please tell the fog and inversion layer to go away. Yes, go away.
March, you, along with February, are the two months that I brag about to non-SoCal folks. Both of you are usually delightful and glorious, warm-ish, sunny, with a few storms that rumble quickly through and leave the mountains draped in white, which is stark contrast to the same two months in many other places in the northern hemisphere.
March, don't let me down. Please either tell the clouds to rain or to go away.
Thanks, jen ;o)
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Mahmoud's Non-Consensual Endorsement Deal | ||||
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Happy New Year to all the folks who celebrate it on the Equinox!
All Colbert snarkiness aside, President Obama has given a Norouz address, and here is the wikipedia article on Nowruz.
New Year used to be celebrated at the spring equinox in Europe but it was changed over to January 1 by the Romans and finalized in various other cultures of Europe by the 1700s. Given how many of our holidays have their roots in the agricultural calendar of neolithic Eurasia and pre-Roman Europe, I would prefer that our New Year was celebrated with the advent of spring rather than an arbitrary date picked by Rome. Besides, spring is much more naturally festive than January in the northern hemisphere.
Happy New Year!
Thurs. 03.19.09 - Magnus and Jeremy on a Thursday afternoon.
Craig Duff of Time.com video'd the Bloggies Awards Ceremony on Monday. Go watch it, the video is a great combo of performances and interviews.
The Bloggies were good fun. Great presenters, great performers (George, Jeremy, and Dan!), and tons of great bloggers! Big thanks to everyone.
Tue 03.17.09 - Purple and Pink at breakfast.
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Update: Will PixelPipe push the photo to my server or will it live on their server just like Flickr does? If PP pushes to my server, I can use it for moblogging when I have a phone without Lifeblog (new Nokias), but if they just send the link to the photo that lives on their server, then why use it over Flickr for the same purpose?
Further update via my twitter: "Huh. PixelPipe is not any different for moblogging than Flickr or others. Photos on their server, not mine. Fail. #ownyourownphotos"
Even more: If Nokia is going to stop putting Lifeblog on their new phones after the Nokia N82, I wish they would open source Lifeblog so developers can iterate and continue to make direct phone to Movable Type moble blogging with no intermediary service or server.
Sun 03.15.09 - Showing the Nokia N79 to Kenyatta and Ella of Rocketboom on a stair landing at the Austin Convention Center at SXSW Interactive.
Here you go, the first day of Ms. Jen's panel transcripts:
Sat March 14, 2006 - SXSW Interactive
Austin, TX
11:30am - The Creative Path
Jim Coudal - Coudal Partners
Brendan Dawes - Magnetic North
Gary Hustwit - Filmmaker "Helvetica", "Objectified"
Objectified premier is at the Paramount at 5pm.
Jim Couldal:
Creative Path: show don't tell.
Speaking on Joseph Conrad, literary theory, "we are complicit in our own corruption" By the time you have finished the book or movie, the narrative leads you through your own corruption much more powerfully than if Conrad was to write an essay.
Montessori - Teaching kids to learn.
Layer Tennis - Live on Friday afternoons, two artists swap a file back and forth in real time. Continue to add to the file on top each other's work. Ultimate end is to probably to reduce productivity on Friday afternoon. Restraint and freedom, creativity comes out of the balance between the two. Keep in mind that the act and result of creation is a conversation, not a lecture.
Gary Hustwit - Seventy-five minutes and thrity-six seconds.
I make documentary films, which are linear fixed forms of media. There is no way for the viewer of the film to change the plot line, characters, destination, or duration of the film, unless they get up and leave.
How do you make a fixed documentary film to be interactive?
1. use ellipsis... Intentionally leave out information, that the viewer of the film needs to put in themselves, a moment of discovery is more compelling than if someone tells you what the story is.
What is not there, what is left out. It leave the piece open to interpretation.
Delayed gratification.
2. Make it a game. bring in puzzles.
Dialogue going on between the viewer and the film.
Timing, juxtaposition.
"If all else fails, put a dog in the film." - Gary Hustwit
Brendan Dawes -
Made a flash video editor in 1998 - Pyscho Studio - See if folks could make their own version of the pyscho shower scene.
The danger is that when you give folks things to play with, you get some weird shit. Then you realize that people are weird.
Human beings versus machines. Computer would plot an efficient line from a to be. Critical Mass by Philip Ball is where he had folks walk across a park, before they put in the paths, to see how humans used the park.
Good design is about taking things away. Gives example of traffic calming in Brighton, by having the sidewalk & street be the same space with no directions & signs -> it makes drivers slow down to 10mph and be much more aware.
Makes sketches, as sketchbooks don't run out of batteries.
doodlebuzz.com - We get complacent with interface, why can't we create new interface.
"People think these days that if you can't use an interface in 2 seconds that it is rubbish. That is rubbish." - Brendan advocates making new UIs and making the user work for it.
You can start with Britney Spears and end up with the Pope. Any interface that allows you to do that is good.
"If you don't go out in the woods, nothing will never happen & your life will never begin..." Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Yes, it is that time of year again, time for SXSW Interactive and the 2009 Weblog Awards!
The Bloggies are the web's longest-running non-profit, reader voted blog awards. The votes are in and the Weblog Awards ceremony will be held on Monday, March 16th at 12:30pm (Central Time, GMT-5) at the SXSW Trade Show Day Stage.
Come join us in celebrating blogs and bloggers at SXSW Monday at lunch. If you can't make in person to the Bloggies Award Ceremony, join us on IRC, #Bloggies on irc.freenode.net, for live coverage and chat. After the ceremony the winning blogs can be found at 2009.bloggies.com.
The 9th Annual Weblog Awards Ceremony will be brought to you this Monday by Ms. Jen and George Kelly, with big ideas & help from Glenda Sims, as well as all the fabulous presenters and bloggers. Extra big thanks to Nikolai Nolan for all his hard work on the Ninth Annual Weblog Awards web site and managing the whole voting process.
If you are going to SXSWi, please come join us on Monday 3/16 at 12:30pm at the Day Stage for the Bloggies!
1) Since I departed last Wednesday afternoon, I have not heard from my Dad, thus no Cam update. Sorry. He has not returned calls, Skype or email, which is not surprising due to the lack of cell reception & internet at his house. While there is internet within 50 ft of my Dad's place, he is not availing himself of it at the current time, but my brother is going out to Arizona tomorrow and will check in with Cam and give me a report.
2) I have a refrigerator full of wild boar. Actually, it is California feral pigs. Farmer's domestic pigs have escaped since the 1800s and now there are feral pigs on the hillsides. Due to the fact that the feral pigs are not native and are very destructive to the environment, there is an all year open hunting season. My brother went hunting at Tejon Ranch last weekend, now I have lots of pig in the frig. Two big legs (aka ham to be), pork chops, sausages, 2 roasts, etc.
I will be making boar prosciutto. Check back with me in 18 months for some slices.
3) Due to 2.5 weeks of family excitement, I am now having epic work/to-do list fail. To the point of big stress. I have 17 work things that absolutely must get done before I get on the plane for Austin to go to SXSW on Thursday. I need at least 2 weeks to do it all rather than 4 days. Approximately half of the to do items are Bloggies related, more on that tomorrow.
Watch Jen spin around in overload...
Yesterday, Wednesday, my Dad, Cam, had his check up ultrasound at his local hospital, the La Paz Regional. After the "all good" ultrasound result from the hospital, we went to lunch at a local Mexican restaurant and then I went to do a good clean at my brother's vacation place.
With Joe's house clean, my dad's fridge stocked, his body in recovery, Scruffy & I were on the road by 3pm yesterday driving back to California. I am very glad to be home after 13 days away.
According to my Dad's doctors, he still needs to rest for another 2-3 weeks before returning to work. Over the last week he went from only being able to be upright and attentive for less than an hour a day to over 6 hours a day. By upright, I mean sitting and occasional walking.
I am glad that Cam is on the mend and on the road to full recovery. I am very grateful for my Mom coming to join me for a week and my brother for his support in the first 5 days. Most of all, I am darned glad that Cam is healing.
Thank you, one and all, for your emails, twitters, pings, texts and phone calls of support. Y'all are wonderful.
p.s. On Sunday, 3/1/09, in the parking lot of the Buckskin Mountain State Park, I had my first "lifer" sighting of a Vermillion Flycatcher, the desert dwelling red & black cousin of the Black Phoebe. I was so ecstatic, I almost hyperventilated. Yes, I am a bird geek.
