Crickets Chirping

SXSW initiates assembly code enforcement teams

(thanks, Edward)

This time I used IBM’s Many Eyes to visualize the data set:

Bubbles:

Map:

I think I like Many Eyes’ visualizations better than Swivel. It’s wonderful that there’s more than one site for this kind of thing. I hope even more show up.

I am kicking myself for not going to this event in years past. I don’t know if I actually did learn anything but I am suffering somewhat from the sudden drop in intellectual stimulation.

Random stuff from my notes, undigested (I know I said I’d distill it but I just don’t have time):

Scientists don’t think of blogging as viable alternative to reviewed journals because citations through blogs don’t help them get funding. That’s a shame. Someone on that panel said something to the effect of “Peer review is the original perpetual beta.”

“Gimme some candy” is written in C#??? wtf, ze? Sigh. Micropatronage will probably have to do until they get the video advertising thing figured out. One panelist cited an ad program where they introduced a 30 second preroll ad on their videos and then suffered a 70% viewership drop from which they never recovered. Don’t poke your viewers in the eye and expect them to stick around. I think video ads on the web should adopt a more subtle product placement strategy instead of breaking the content into program and advertising segments. Find people make shows that involve stuff you sell, and sponsor them- works for Cooking with Rock Stars

The World Changing talk was a great follow up to Will Wright’s demo of Spore. Weather simulation is only part of that amazing game, and I love the idea that you people learn to think about problems by playing with toys (or video games). Products should come with “Environmental Nutrition” labels like Background Stories.

I learned some completely facinating stuff at this talk but I’m not going to blog about it here. Okay I’ll mention this: JeJoue – it’s like Max/MSP for vibrators. I had no idea things had progressed so far, and yet still have so much further to go.

And my reaction to all this continual partial attention/Twitter stuff is that people need to get over themselves and re-read The Grim Meathook Future:

Meanwhile, most of the people with any genuine opportunity or ability to effect global change are too busy patting each other on the back at conventions and blue-skying goofy social networking tools that are essentially useless to 95% of the world’s population, who live within fifteen feet of everyone they’ve ever known and have no need to track their fuck buddies with GPS systems. (This, by the way, includes most Americans, quite honestly.)

Highlights:

Josh getting up on stage at the Heather Gold show and saying the funniest line of the evening.

Robert Scoble sat next to me on the front row for the Bust 2.0 talk- I told him that I gave my friend shit for getting his photo taken with him, but then I did the exact same thing when I saw ze. Scoble laughed and said, “yeah, I did that too.”

I wrote a web scraper for the sxsw music site using scRUBYt and posted some of the results to Swivel:

By state:

and By City:

Last night I saw Don Caballero and Peelander-Z. Don Cab is a three piece with a guitarist who uses a looping pedal to add more sound. Their music is complex rhythmically altough some of their songs sound like they’re snapped together like legos (to borrow a simile from Shawn). Overall I really liked what they played. Which is funny since the last time I heard them was in my friend’s picup truck when he gave me a ride home from high school. Guess I should have given them another listen.

Peelander-Z, in case you haven’t heard of them, is like watching power rangers on crack. Their instruments match the red, yellow and blue costumes they wear onstage. The music is punk peppered with spastic gibberish (“Mad Tiger!!!!”) and they spend about half the show running around in the audience or surfing the crowd. Later in the show, the bassist hauled a suitcase out and opened it on stage to reveal a bunch of pots, pans, pet food bowls and drum sticks. I watched from the stairwell above as people from the audience grabbed them and started beating them together. Next thing I knew, everybody was on stage. The band members ceded control of the their instruments to random willing participants from the audience who (to my suprise) kept the song going as the band member set up bowling pins on the ground. The show ended with the singer (now dressed in a large bowling pin costume) crashing into them from a running start across the bar.

Wednesday night I saw Panda Band (They sucked. I’ll say no more.) and Holy Fuck. I missed Holy Fuck last year so I was happy to see them this time around. They sound great on the album but I was curious as to how they could pull off the live drummer/bassist thing with everything else being sequenced/arp’d. I was impressed, although I wasn’t close enough to the stage to see much of what was going on. Holy Fuck should not be confused with Fucked Up, who played last night and are also from Toronto (what the fuck is up with Toronto bands with Fuck in the name?)

Here’s a well worn path:

A homeless shelter, a liquor store and a police station, all within a block of eachother. I was walking back to my car after getting my SXSWi badge, thinking about design and usability, and what a great example to pass on the way. They must have been thinking ahead when they put these three services in such close vicinity to eachother.

I don’t think GMaps has rendered the shortest path between these points though, and that reminds me: Google Maps ain’t so great for walking directions- the direction of traffic doesn’t matter so the stumbling drunk doesn’t need to make that many turns.

Hm. Maybe GMaps took the particular destinations into account, and drew the most common series of turns taken by those who go from homeless shelter to liquor store to jail.