Friday 03.12.10 - Friday used to be the Day 0, but now there are a full set of panels & parties, so welcome to the new SXSW Interactive Day 1.

Let the madness begin.

Thurs 03.11.10 - Austin is lovely today. Tons of folk already here. While a very large line to register at the convention center, it was very efficient.

Yes, I am blogging, tweeting, and reading on the web while sitting in seat 24A. Yay!

Thank you, GoGo Inflight!

Wed 03.10.10 - Today was the day I was too be running around errands, finishing up details, laundry, packing, etc etc etc, in preparation for a 6am flight Thursday morning to Austin, Texas.

The whole day today was derailed by a nasty light phobic migraine that kept me in bed until around 4pm. It is all the fault of kimchi and my innate pre-travel fridge frugality. I always feel the need to not waste any food that might go off while I am out traveling and I try to make all kinds of interesting dishes before I depart as to not have to throw anything out.

This is a bad impulse. I have now gotten sick 3x just before flying. Silly me.

There was a large quart jar of kimchi from AR supermarket that was in the final dregs for a couple of weeks now living on the top shelf of my fridge. Why I felt compelled to eat the remainders I don't know, since I already know that kimchi older than a couple of days makes me tummy sick & triggers headaches. Le Sigh.

So, today's photo was of Scruffy & Magnus wrestling while I was trying to recoup from my ill-advise kimchi consumption.

Tomorrow, super early, I am off to SXSW for Interactive. See you there!

Tues 03.09.10 - This afternoon Viv Hernandez told me that Lulu and Myke got engaged on Lu's birthday last Friday night, and then a few minutes later Lulu and Myke showed up at Alex's.

I am so excited for Lulu and Myke, not only are they a very good match, but Lu and I have been friends for years through much trials and laughter and I am so damned glad that Lu has found a life love in a good, strong willed man such as Myke.

I got to know Myke when we were all in Hawaii last May for Alex & Paige's wedding and even though their relationship was young at the time, I hoped that Lu and Myke would last.

Yay. Lu knows that I have been hoping, praying, and encouraging her for over a decade. Yay ten times.

Much love and many blessings on the union of Lulu Aphessetche and Myke Elsbury!

More than worth the time to watch as Episode 1 of PBS's Faces of America is excellent.

American Stories explores the dynamic and shifting relationship America had with her new immigrants in the 20th century. World war tore apart families and sundered the fabric of many lives, but America beckoned and millions came. Yet, America was an ambivalent host. At its best, a place of refuge and salvation, as for film director Mike Nichols whose entire family escaped Nazi Germany. At its worst, a country that would imprison two generations of Japanese Americans, like the ancestors of Olympic gold medalist Kristi Yamaguchi. Along the way, we'll discover the buoyant American optimism that shaped chance - as in a single encounter that changed cellist Yo-Yo Ma's life forever - to pave the road to success.

Dear Nokia,

As a 12 year vet of SXSW, here are my tips and tricks for a great SXSW experience, particularly my food recommendations.

Don't miss the Kickball game at Palm Park on Sat. March 13, 2010 at 10:30. More info at http://www.dashes.com/kick

While I already have my SXSW Interactive Badge & plane flight, I would love to win a white Nokia N86 to take lots of great photos & video at SXSW (see min 3:30 to end of video).

Less than a week away folks! It will be fun! ;o)

Ms. Jen

This year I am taking off, not from SXSW as the rubric should suggest given it is 2010, but from Bowling. I just can't do everything, and this week after months of working hard on a web app and a few other projects, I had to make the decision to trim something. Something that takes lots of social energy, creative energy, and some money. And that something was Bowling.

This year BYO Records and the Sterns are ramping up the event to include a Music Festival, I say - Bravo! I hope it goes well for the Barflies.net team, for BYO, and for all the lovely folks who will be bowling and merry making. I will not be joining the weekend long party.

By the graces of the Grace, in May, I will be in London or the like as it is time to make a transition.

Yes, I am officially job searching. If you have room on your team for a kick ass, intelligent, creative developer & mobile user experience professional, let me know. I am looking to join a great company, make a difference, and relocate.

Wish me well. And to all the Bowlers, have a grand good time!

Now that I am many python files into a complex application, I have been trying to refactor some of the code to reflect a one-to-many relationship database relationship and my four hour frustration today was that the example code given for database/datastore model relationships in the Google App Engine Python docs works in the interactive python console but when one translates it to one's models the code does not work.

It has been my experience all the way along that the code examples in the docs are either very basic and don't reflect dynamic datastore usage or that they are very abstract. I have found that it is good to read the docs for the theory of how it should work and then go look at an example of actual working production code from the samples to see how it really works and then spend multiple hours to make the theory work to your code based on how the implementation of the theory worked for someone else.

My experience in PHP is that the code works as advertised. My biggest frustration(s) with PHP is the (1) danged punctuation ({;}); plus a few more ;;;;, which leads to debugging purgatory, and (2) that in reading the various Php.net docs and the blogs out there one has no real idea what really are best practices in PHP right now as there is so much cruft code, old code, and competing code examples on the net.

Python is so beautiful and clean without the punctuation nightmares of PHP, but it is so difficult to transliterate abstracted Python code examples for Google App Engine's webapp & datastore written by ethereal Python engineer ninjas and then try to figure out how to make it work for those of us who have not ascended to the level of deity but still have our feet on the ground while we scratch our heads or pull out hair in frustration in our attempts to 'correctly' solve problems rather than hack away.

((O.o))