I’d heard so much about how charming and cute this movie was that I had rather high expectations for it. A movie with a title that involves “Infinite Playlist”, stars Michael Cera, and has Vampire Weekend in the opening credits should conjure up some kind of cross between Juno and High Fidelity. I’m pretty sure that’s what they were going for, too but sadly, it just fell just short of that potential and felt contrived instead. [imdb link]
I lived in Austin, Texas from 1999-2003 and have attended SxSW Interactive every year since 2004. Each year, I attended SxSW each year with a different role:
This post isn’t about the best food in Austin (Rudy’s BBQ and Amy’s Ice Cream) or the best parties to attend. There are plenty of resources out there about those. Instead, you might consider this a beginner’s guide for how to get the most out of SxSW.
You’re at the conference, excited to meet all the people you’ve been reading online. You see them, gathered outside Room 18ABC in a circle chatting with each other and greeting their internet famous peers passing by.
Without fail, every person first timer at SxSWi has the same feedback: they have the sense that there’s an “in” crowd or that there are the “cool” kids and then there’s everyone else outside of that circle. I had the same impressions on my first trip.
What people don’t realize until they go a second or third time is that SxSWi is not just a conference — it’s a reunion. It’s the one time a year that I see some of my peers that live in cities or countries I don’t frequent. So there’s a lot of catching up with old friends that happens. Personally, I love meeting new and interesting people.
The lesson is to know that, for the most part, everyone is welcoming but you have to make the effort and break the ice. Recognize that few are being deliberately exclusionary.
On one of my earlier SxSW outings, I lamented about the “double handshake” where people shake your hand a second time when they recognize your work or who you are. The fact is, there are hundreds upon hundreds of people. I hate asking the question, “what do you do?” especially since it often is construed as “where do you work?” Instead, I try to understand who they are and what they care about. A friend of mine goes so far as to ask, “what are you passionate about?”
Conversations are a lot more memorable when you provide context of who you are and what projects you work on. Maybe it’s a blog about potato chips shaped like famous people. Maybe you’re a gal that draws on index cards. Maybe you are giving stickers to tag people. Whatever the case, giving some additional context goes a long way.
The first year I went, we had trading cards of famous HCI and usability practitioners dressed as superheroes. It was a fantastic icebreaker and helped people remember us or recognize that we were associated with a site they read.
Also, context doesn’t end with the introductions. We all collect dozens of business cards at conferences. Try to provide context there, too. I’ve found I remember the cards with photos more and some people leave room on their cards specifically to write in the context of your meeting.
Use whatever the tools du jour are. Two years ago, it was Dodgeball. Last year, it was Twitter. This year, it will likely be a combination of Twitter, Brightkite and the newly launched Dodgeball replacement, foursquare. Get an unlimited SMS plan (even if it’s just for the month) and stay on the pulse.
I like to use the tech to be aware of what’s going on so I can bypass stupid lines, boring panels, or join a much smaller gathering where I’m guaranteed higher quality conversations.
Just remember what you’re using the tools for. They serve you, not the other way around. Being physically present at an awesome party means nothing if you’re mentally in your phone.
This lesson was probably the hardest to learn. You can’t go to every panel and you can’t go to every party. Get over it now.
No, really. You can’t. Get over it.
Be willing to skip some panels if you’re having fascinating conversations in the hallway because you may not run into that person for the rest of the time there. Be willing to skip the big party that everyone’s talking to if there’s a great dinner group forming and you can talk one on one with some attendees without fighting the alcohol blur and the loud music. Be willing to skip everything to go to the Austin City Limits soundstage for a free show of a great band, or to go to Spider House Coffee and Toy Joy — just to enjoy Austin for what it is.
But just so you know what and how much there is to do:
I will be arriving Saturday, Mar 14 and staying through Music until Sun Mar 22. Find me on Twitter as @k if you want to meet up. While I have a published SxSW schedule, I fully expect to deviate completely from the plans. You should expect the same.
There are two recurring questions that I find myself answering. The two are different but related:
My short answer is I don’t treat it like a fire hose I have to drink down, I treat it like a stream I dip my feet in every so often. To explain this statement, I need to first talk about friends and travel.
I was born in Vancouver, spent my formative years in Hong Kong and then returned to Vancouver for the last two years of high school and college before moving to Austin for my first job. All this moving was a mixed blessing. I was able to experience many different perspectives and made a wide range of friends from all over the world. On the other hand, there were few friends that shared my experiences throughout.
Whenever I visited Hong Kong, which is roughly annually, I meet up with my childhood friends. Conventional thinking would say that, because we haven’t seen each other for a year, we’d have a lot more to catch up on than say, someone here in San Francisco that I saw just the day before.
Anyone who has experience with this can tell you that it simply isn’t true. When you’re apart that long, conversation topics feel like they need to be a minimum level of significance to be worth discussing: career changes, marital status change, buying of property, perhaps a new family member, etc. A sample conversation might be like this:
Friend: “So how’ve you been?”
Me: “Great. Things are going well. I got engaged!”
Friend: “Congrats! You still doing that computer thing?”
Me: “Yeah. Still at the same place. You still at the same firm?”
Friend: “Yeah, 3 years now.”
Me: “Wow …”
Friend: “MmHmm …”
In contrast, the friends you see every day or every week are the ones you can talk to for hours. Why? Because any topic is fair game. You don’t feel like you have to filter out the more mundane topics because it’s such a significant event to be catching up with the person. How was that movie? Did you go climbing yesterday? Did you see that crazy YouTube video? No topic is too trivial.
So how is any of that relevant to the information overload of Twitter and Facebook?
To me, Twitter and Facebook updates represent the mundane, everyday conversations that I could and would have with everyone if I could. By seeing the stream of updates from my friends, I have much more context into their lives, and a feeling that I can converse with them about smaller things. To use a clichéd term, I feel more connected to them.
When I see these friends, even after many months apart, I still feel like I’ve been talking to them and keeping up with them to some extent. Conversations flow more naturally and are much more rooted in the present than trying to bridge the gap since we last interacted in person.
I disagree with the fire hose terminology because it’s not something that is pointed at me. It really is a stream of information which I can look at anytime I feel like. When I don’t dip my feet in, the stream flows on, I’ve missed some updates, and it doesn’t matter.
We can look at it a different way, too. Whether we know it or not, each of us probably have at least 300 people we know and like enough to want to keep in touch with. If you saw each of these people for dinner one friend a night, you would see each person once a year. One solution is to simply forget most of these and hang out with the same dozen friends week after week. Realistically, there are far more than a dozen interesting and inspiring people worth interacting with regularly.
So going back to the original two questions:
Don’t drink from the hose. Dip your feet in the stream instead.
I grew up on anime. In particular, like every teenager in Asia, I grew up watching, reading and in my case, drawing Dragonball Z. It was easily the most popular series in its time (the equivalent title nowadays would be Naruto). So when I found out there was going to be a live action movie, I was pretty terrified. As it turns out, I was rightfully so. Here’s the casting for the main character, Son Goku:
I’m not particularly active in the local Asian (North) American scene nor do I keep up much with local or national issues related to Asian Americans. But one pet peeve of mine has always been the role of Asians in Hollywood.
In the movie 21 based on the novel “Bringing Down the House” which, in turn, was based on a true story from MIT, the main character was converted from Asian to Caucasian. What was particularly irksome about this casting was that the story clearly states that most members of the blackjack team were minorities. In fact, they needed to be minorities because it was much more convincing for minorities to act like rich heirs playing their parents’ money at the high stakes tables.
The MIT team thrived by choosing BPs [Big Players] who fit the casino mold of the young, foolish, and wealthy. Primarily nonwhite, either Asian or Middle Eastern, these were the kids the casinos were accustomed to seeing bet a thousand bucks a hand.
I vented about that so much that my friend Ernie wrote about it on his group blog, 8 Asians.
Now, they can’t even seem to feel comfortable casting an Asian as a lead on a Japanese animation adaptation about martial arts.
In this regard, I am frequently disappointed about the role of Asians in North America and sometimes wonder if more needs to be done. More disturbing than the answer to questions like, “will we ever see an Asian play a lead role in a movie without having to play an Asian?”, “when will we see an Asian winning an Academy Award for Best Actor or Actress?” or “how long before an Asian President seems likely?” is how infrequently these questions ever seems to be asked.
Stupid, minor, seemingly inconsequential decisions like this casting serve to remind me how narrow minded mainstream Hollywood and its audience can still be — and make me wonder how far out I can extrapolate that generalization.
I think between Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, I’ve definitely become a Danny Boyle fan. I think the genius of this film is the juxtaposition of something as inane and shallow as a game show with the harsh reality of a life growing up in the slums. The pacing and switchovers between the two are really well executed and you wonder for much of the film how the main character went from one to the other. [imdb link]
When iPhone apps first came out, there were two iPhone apps people tended to go with for accessing and posting to the popular Twitter service: Twinkle and Twitterific. Since then, superior applications such as TwitterFon and Tweetie have hit the market but the first to market advantage has ensured some measure of popularity with the original applications.
It seems that Twinkle is taking advantage of their popularity in a completely irresponsible manner.
Before I go into details, let me quickly recap how Twitter’s conversations work. When you publicly reply to a person on Twitter, you type @USERNAME. So if my username was kevin, you’d type “@kevin that’s so true!”. Twitter and pretty much all Twitter applications support this syntax by providing a “replies” view which shows you every public Twitter that starts with @YOURUSERNAME. So you can see that it’s fairly important for these usernames to remain unique.
Enter Twinkle, who turn out to not just be a Twitter application, but a social network of their own. A person who uses Twinkle doesn’t have to be a Twitter user as well. They might just be Twinkle users, with Twinkle usernames. Thus, there are now two sets of namespaces with duplicate identities that might belong to two different people (a person named Peter on Twitter and a different person named Peter on Twinkle).
Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. I have usernames all over the place. However, Twinkle decided that the way a Twinkle user should reply to other Twinkle users is also with the @ syntax and if the poster happens to use Twitter as well, that reply goes to Twitter.
What does this mean?
Let’s say there is a Twitter and Twinkle user and his username is Peter on both services. He has a friend who is on Twinkle only and her username is Jane. Suppose Jane says something witty on Twinkle and Peter decides to respond:
@jane LOL. That’s pretty brilliant, mate.
As a user of both services, his response goes out on both channels — Twitter and Twinkle.
At the same time, JaneB, a Twitter user who has never heard of Twinkle and the owner of the Twitter username @jane, logs onto Twitter. She checks her replies tab and notices Peter’s message. Except she has no clue who Peter is, nor what he thinks that her last Twitter message about her aunt being ill is all that brilliant or funny.
Essentially, Twinkle’s poor product design, or if you give them less credit, their irresponsible product design, is hijacking Twitter usernames. I’m not the only one who’s noticed this, either. Their Get Satisfaction page includes a number of threads like this:
The poster is right. It is completely unacceptable. In an environment where we’re trying to find solutions like OpenID to consolidate our identities, Twinkle has managed to find a way to create an application that now muddies the definition of who owns a username. The question is, what can really be done? My suggestion is that Twinkle doesn’t ever cross post responses to Twinkle users to Twitter as well.
But the real question is, what’s to stop anyone from coming onto Twitter and creating a similar kind of clusterf**k, polluting or spamming every @name there is?
Update: It looks like in addition to using the @ syntax, they also allow spaces and special characters (e.g., commas, dashes, etc.) as usernames. So now if your username is @kevin on Twitter, you may be getting responses in your replies tab for people who say “@kevin spacey” or “@kevin.cheng”. If you wish to voice a complaint to Twinkle and Tapulous, you may want to add your thoughts on this thread.
I watched The Times of Harvey Milk documentary (which is on Hulu) before watching this movie. It’s interesting to see the same story told twice, once from afar and once as though you were a part of it. One thing is certainly allows for is a reference point to recognize just how good Sean Penn was as Milk. I occasionally thought, “Wait! This is Sean Penn!” during the movie. As others have said, this movie makes me proud to be a San Franciscan and ashamed that we didn’t fight harder against Prop 8. [imdb link]
I’m a big fan of hoodies. They’re versatile, warm, casual and extremely comfortable. There’s also a lot of really great designs for hoodies out there. For example, there’s a full zip up Storm Tropper hoodie.
Last Christmas, I received a hoodie from my friend Diana. It was a black hoodie with black imprints of ninja silhouettes. Little did she know the extent of its awesomeness. It turned out that the hoodie, when zipped up, transformed the wearer into a ninja. Not only that, the inside of the hoodie had a designated nunchuk holder. This hoodie quickly became the best hoodie I’ve ever seen.
Then this Christmas, at the Raptr holiday party, we all received Raptr branded hoodies. Much to my chagrin, as awesome as the hoodies are, we didn’t go through with the idea to put the dino eyes on the top of the hoods. When I suggested that I should perhaps iron on the eyes to my hoodie, my fiancée Coley mysteriously told me that I wouldn’t need to.
As it turns out, the most awesome hoodie was yet to come. Coley gave me this amazing full zip hoodie for Christmas. It has been described as a Raptrzilla and a raptor/Venom (from Spiderman) hybrid. I simply describe it as, “the best”. What’s particularly awesome about this is the way you can see through the yes and breath through the mouth due to the mesh design around those areas.
Of course, she had no idea what kind of monster would be unleashed …
I was trying to create an iPhone ringtone using Rogue Amoeba’s MakeiPhoneRingTone application. This applicaiton requires AAC files to be dragged in. “No problem,” I thought, “iTunes does AAC conversions.” And it does but apparently, the interface to get there has become really obfuscated so I thought I’d document how to do it. Everything else out there is horribly outdated and inaccurate.
First, you might find on Apple, this support document about how to do this. That process, though only 6 months old, is also outdated but it did help me figure out the real process.
Here’s the process to convert media to the format you want now:
In case anyone is interested, before converting them to AAC, I used Audacity to format my music to a manageable, ringtone chunk.
I’ve got two artists that I’d like to recommend, both of whom happened to feature Asian-American roots. The first is a friend and fellow San Franciscan Goh Nakamura. In his words,
Goh Nakamura is a San Francisco Bay Area based musician who writes ditties about parking tickets, impossible crushes and faraway dreamlands.
Goh’s music is a collection of bittersweet melodies and I’ve been listening to his work since my former roommate Min Jung introduced me to him and his work at local events.
His vocals are soulful and the lyrics charming in an unpretentious way. He just released his second album, which he’s been working for years on and if you’re in the Bay Area, he will be playing one of his largest gigs yet as the headliner at the Rickshaw Stop. More importantly, you can sample his music for free. Check out his album, Ulysses.
The second artist is one I’ve been loving since my friend Leonard had them booked at a SxSW Upcoming.org party two years ago. The Little Ones had two addictive EPs that I used to listen to on repeat so I was instantly intrigued when I heard that they’d released their first full length album.
Morning Tide is instantly catchy, in your head, addictive and contains all the elements that define indie pop. It’s now at the top of my rotation and has been since I purchased it last week. Once again, it’s on repeat. It’s available on iTunes but I recommend checking out their music on Last.fm and then buying it at Amazon MP3, where the music is DRM-less.
About
Kevin Cheng is a global nomad who's settled in San Francisco after calling Vancouver, Hong Kong, Austin and London his homes. Founder of Off Panel Productions and OK/Cancel. Product manager at Twitter, former Director of User Experience at Raptr, a social network for gamers, and former designer of Pipes and Bravonation at Yahoo!. Presenter on numerous design subjects. Reachable at kc -at- this domain.
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