Bluebirdy

People seem happy here. I just ran into two Austin transplants (one from San Francisco and the other from Seattle) at one of the booths at the SXSW trade show. “It’s living in the city, but with none of the big city craziness,” one said. “There’s a million things to do all around Austin.” There is. I picked up an Austin Chronicle and there was an insert for adult education classes at the University of Texas. Dancing, painting, drawing, photography. It was all in there, and all in the evening. Nothing like those stupid “Mountain View Adult Education” flyers I get in the mail advertising watercolor classes that are held on Tuesdays at ten in the morning. Apparently back home “adults” are people 65 and up who have nothing better to do on a weekday. The rest of us? Well, why in hell would we want to take a painting class? We just want to work until we’re 65 so we can afford that machine that’ll keep our hearts pumping when we retire.

As for the conference, yesterday I attended some panels about writing and blogging. There’s a guy who sold part of his blog about his asshole escapades as a book that later became a New York Times bestseller. He was an asshole during the panel too. Is this when life imitates art? Or is this just an asshole being an asshole? Apparently no one will buy book rights to my blog since I don’t get so drunk that I beat the crap out of hockey mascots or take my pants off in a sushi restaurant and then puke in the bushes. Hopefully this guy knows about investing, so he can put those book royalties in the bank for future income. His career path doesn’t sound like it scales well into old age. But hell, maybe he won’t live past 45 anyway and it’s really all part of his grand plan. He said, “As a writer, I’m not Tolstoy, but I’m good.” He forgot to mention, “With sincere apologies to Tolstoy.” I read some of his stuff. He’s not good. He’s just an asshole. And I guess there are lots of people out there who find that amusing.

Conferences get old quickly, especially when there’s no good wireless internet access and the power outlets are all in the back of the room. I was lamenting this fact when some chick whipped a full-blown surge protector out of her backpack and plugged it into the outlet. “Share the wealth!” she said in a chirpy voice, then plopped back in her seat. I stared at the back of her head for a while, then shrugged and crawled over to plug in.

Kathy Sierra gave a keynote speech yesterday in which she said “People are not passionate about things they suck at.” My immediate reaction was to agree. My secondary reaction was to disagree, then of course, bristle. While I suspect Sierra was talking about web applications, she presented her statement as the kind of quote people copy off the web and spread around in email chain forwards, ostensibly applicable to all situations. For example, I love hockey. In fact, I loved it when I really sucked and I still love it now that I medium-suck. One might even say that sucking made me more passionate about trying to reduce my general level of suckiness. I suppose in the world of web applications, most people aren’t going to be excited about trying to learn a new tool when it’s a means to an end.

Maybe this goes back to my previous post about “doing” and not simply “knowing.” If you do, then by default you are passionate, and sucking or not sucking is irrelevant. It’s when you decide you’re going to just “try” that discourages passion by encouraging suck. Sierra’s statement makes this scenario sound like a catch-22. If I’m not passionate about something, I’ll never become good. If I’m not good at something I won’t be passionate about it. Neither is true, but neither is false, either. Passion really helps.

I’m passionate about photography and I’m not too great at it. Still, I need something visual for this blog besides my incessant philosophizing. Austin is famous for its Mexican long-tongued bats that have established a permanent colony under the Congress Ave. bridge. We took a hike to the bridge yesterday evening to watch them depart on their nightly bug hunt. As it turns out, prime season for the bats is May to August, and while there were certainly more bats than I’ve ever seen in one place, it wasn’t the “turn the sky black for 40 minutes” colony we’d been hoping for. I still ran around like a kid with a toy camera trying to photograph them (except that in reality I have a $1000 SLR and am more of an immature paparazzi who ran into her boss’s boss twice while trying to get a shot). Unfortunately even 4000 bats can’t match 40,000 bats, so it was hard to shoot them against the twilight horizon.

We trekked up to Guerro’s, a Tex Mex restaurant up a hill and on the way there I shot this. According to a person in our group, this is the top result for the word “penis” on Google Image Search. I think he was making this up, because I did a search for this word (of course) and couldn’t find the photo. Maybe he meant, “used to be.”

Today I slept through the morning panels, attended a stupid one where all the panelists were talking about what kind of music they listened to when they were doing design and what kind of soap they liked and how you should always name your Photoshop layers when you have 150 of them, and then sat through one very entertaining panel on the subject of teledildonics and porn interfaces for such devices. While not really shocked about how piss poor these UIs were, I was rather surprised at how little time the “designers” spent thinking about this very unique user experience. One of the panelists displayed a screen capture of a UI for controlling one of these devices, and it consisted of sliders and radio buttons and other widgets you’d see in something like a banking application. As he aptly put it, “This isn’t sexy. This is like fucking your printer driver.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Blogger threw a party with an open bar tonight, but you know how that’s wasted on me. I think I simply enjoy being a sober dork much more than a drunk one.

March 11th, 2007 | Category: Uncategorized | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL