EchoDitto

South by Southwest was an absolute blast. I could go on and on about the panels I attended or the people I met, but I'll just say they were all awesome. Instead this will be about what I saw as the overarching themes of the conference: accessibility and data ownership/transferability.

Big Point #1: Everyone is online. We're all aware of this, but too few of us produce work that is accessible to anyone besides english readers in standard web browsers. What about assistive technologies? What about non-english readers? How will we deal with localizing our work? There are some great projects to help with the creation and maintenance of content in multiple languages. More and more, we're going to have to make use of these things.

For two years now, my trusty Nokia 3220 has been at my side. Well, in my pocket. A belt clip is a fashion faux pas, right? Right. Anyway, we are very faithful partners.

It functions excellently as a phone and little else. It has a camera! but you wouldn't want to photograph anything with it. It has a browser! but who reads WAP pages? It does not have a QWERTY keyboard. You must will your texts.

What a drag.

Still, it was sort of exhilarating.

Tonight was my one year anniversary of moving to Washington. I spent it at some friends' house a few blocks north from where I live. We ate excellent spinach lasagna while watching some crumby sitcoms. Something about Julia Louis-Dreyfus sleeping with Andy Richter. Everyone had had an intense work-filled weekend, so our brains were throughly switched off. Soon I said goodbye to head home and do a little more work.

I stuck in my earbuds and a few blocks south arrived at my street. By this point I had "Hanningfield Window" by Squarepusher blaring away ( which by the way is an excellent track to get mugged to). I noticed a guy hanging out in a dark, little staircase at the beginning of the street. It wasn't really a spot many people would choose to hang out in, so I thought "man, this guy looks a little sketchy, I'm going to cross the street." So I did, and I figured it was nothing. There are always people hanging out on my street. Either way, my place was about three houses up from where I was.