So The first actual day of SXSW comes to a close and it’s off to a good start. I’m with my colleague Evan Lask. I went to the following presentations/panels.

Minority Report is Real

This was more of an idea panel than anything on the potential future of multi touch interfaces. Most of the information covered in this one is posted on their blog set up specifically for that purpose, that’s here. http://www.immersiveux.com/

Oooh, That’s Clever! (Unnatural Experiments in Web Design)

Paul Annett from Clearleft had an excellent presentation on some of the craziest places a designer/developer could draw inspiration from. I’ll post a link dump later today with some of the examples he had showed.

Social Engineering: Scam Your Way Into Anything or From Anybody 

Not at all relevant to my professional career. It didn’t matter, this was pretty rad in all. I’ve watched a few episodes of Scam School on Revision3 before, so I had an idea of what Brian Brushwood was going to cover. He did a high level rundown of different ways to have influence over people with out them realizing it, as well as a few tips on how to identify and try to circumvent a con. Overall, I I loved this presentation, Brushwood is an excellent presenter.

For day 1,it was 3 for 3 of cool presentations, off to a great start.

I’m doing realtime updates on twitter, under the username flipnode, and recaps as soon as I can get them online.

So the buttons and ball top that I ordered from Lizard Lick came in today. I went with them on my readings at SRK. After giving them a shot, I say check them out, my experience was totally ace.

With these buttons pulled out of the glorious USPS shipping box, I replaced the buttons on the arcade stick I just bought last week. A pretty simple process, and I only stripped one bolt in total!

After swapping them out, I jumped into a quick game or two of Street Fighter HD Remix, the difference in the feel of the buttons is insane! I must say that the buttons do feel much more true to an arcade experience. I still suck at the game of course, but come Street Fighter 4 next week, I’ll be playing the hell out of that.

First, it’s pretty awesome that Canada Post makes Saturday deliveries on priority packages. I wake up and I find out that they delivered the arcade stick I ordered on line from the folks at Arcade Shock. From the time  the order was submitted to the time I received it it took 5 business days, pretty impressed, and it was shipped USPS to boot! Will definitely order from them again.

Anyway, back to the stick. People who know about the Real Arcade Pro series by Hori know that it’s a solid arcade stick, and built to last. I’m not an expert when it comes to this stuff, but from the reading I’ve done at the SRK forums this was a pretty good stick to get.

Based on the hour or so I played with it, things I liked:

+ The joystick. It’s a Sanwa JLF, not much to say about that, it’s a solid stick.

+ The weight. The whole thing is pretty hefty, which I like. It won’t move around alot when you are playing.

Things I don’t like:

- Button layout. Not sure why they decided to lay it out like this. I’m guessing it’s because it’s the same button layout as the EX2 stick they released.

- The Buttons. They don’t feel quite right, probably because of the Hori-brand buttons in the stick. Not a big deal, since  I already have some Sanwa ones coming in the mail.

I’ll have more on this in a few days when I have put some time into it (and the new Sanwa buttons come in!).

I was sitting on the bus on Saturday and decided to install a Twinkle on my iPhone, since I’ve been hearing good things about it. As a result of that installation I’ve also set up a twitter account (flipnode) to play around with it.

Before this, I could never understand why Twitter was making so much noise in terms of buzz on the web. After spending a couple days posting to it when I have nothing else to do, I think I can learn to love it. At it’s very core (to me anyways), you’re essentially sending text messages to the Internet at large. At first it seems bizarre, sending messages out into the series of tubes we all know and love, not knowing who will read it, or where it will get quoted; but once you get past that I think it’s a pretty awesome thing. I find it amazing that a random post can spawn a discussion between a whole bunch of potentially random users. Talk about social at it’s finest.

Bottom line, I totally dig it. Huzzah microblogging!

A followup to my previous post. I noticed that speed has been consistent throughout the day, and no 302 errors yet. I think they may have fixed the issue on the carrier end, at least in the Calgary area. Keeping my fingers crossed it stays fast, but as with anything on a wireless carrier, I won’t be surprised if things go south.

Now I can divert my attention to iPhone development. yeah!

I would say the wait was worth it, not having to use a patched firmware every time a new version came out is a definite plus. Sure, there is still issues with official application stability on 2.0, MobileMe is sometime sketchy (I’ve had pretty good luck since launch, colleagues not so much). and bugs in the firmware itself where kind of downers.

All is not rosy in the land of iPhone in Canada, and from the reading and conversations I’ve had, I’m not alone. Many on Rogers and Fido have probably experienced this when using Safari or other apps that use the data network:

Right when the phone launched, everything was gravy, pages loaded fast (far faster than when I was on Edge on my old phone), and everything was awesome in the land of iPhone. After a week or so, I started to get “kCFErrorDomainCFNetwork error 302″ every so often, I ignored it as I see that happen in Safari when I’m browsing on Macs. Just refresh once or twice and it will usually load the page.

It started to happen more often, so I decided to do some Googling. Lo and behold, stuff popped up on Howard Forums, a gigantic cellular enthusiasts site. Others have reported the same problem, and Rogers support has tried to  give solutions.

Doing some further experimenting, I’m pretty sure it’s not the phone that’s the problem. Every other person that I work with in Calgary that I’ve talked to so far is experiencing the same issue. Add to that I did some tests throughout the day, around 5:30AM MST on the way to work, no problems. Pages load up snappy, no issues with timeouts. Midday and on the way home, it pop’s up one in every two tries to request a page. This leads me to believe it’s a traffic congestion issue on Roger’s end of things. 

Fingers crossed this gets fixed soon, if it is indeed an issue of network congestion, it’s pretty obvious that it should have been addressed 

In any case I’ll do more Googling to see what I can find, just logging my progress.

Valve Software (more specifically, the team that does the Steam platform) recently started the public beta offering of the Steam Community service. If you’ve used Microsoft’s Games for Windows Live service before, it might feel similar in what it does. I gave it a shot today, poking around the web app they have as well as the updated interface to the Steam client. At it’s very core, it beefs up the Tracker (aka ‘Friends’) features significantly, making it a far more reliable IM service than previously offered.

I must say, it feels sort of like a cross between a messenger and a social networking app. A Facebook tailored for gamers. I’m intrigued as to how it will pan out. I’m all for better experience when it comes to matchmaking features. At the very least once it’s rolled out to the entire population of gamers that use Steam, it will be a good user profiling tool for Valve . I really dig the closely tied infrastructure between the Steam Client and the web app, it makes for a pretty seamless experience moving between the two.

P.S. I’ve added a few more photos to my NYC trip Flickr set. It looks like I’m about half way through culling the best of the best of what I took.

I picked up a copy of Weeds season 1 and Crash on Blu-ray today, both of which got absolutely stellar reviews. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to get through one of these on the weekend.