The image above is the second in a series of collages from a childhood sketchbook.

Over the years, I’ve met, been inspired by, and become friends with many of my fellow web weavers. Getting to meet a lot of those people in person at my first SXSW last year and then again at The Webmaster Jam Session last Summer has been an awesome experience. Despite what anybody says about the size/growth of the SXSWi conference, being there really shows you what an intimate, tight-knit, and amicable group the web design/dev community really is. I can’t wait to see some familiar faces and meet tons of new ones. Here’s a list of fellow bloggers I hope to run into in Austin and their Pre-SXSW commentaries:

• Douglas Bowman
• Jared Christensen
• Dan Cederholm
• Jeff Croft
• Rob Weychert
• Lea Alcantara
• Dave Shea
• Paul Boag
• Jeffrey Zeldman
• Richard Rutter
• Matthew Pennell
• Cindy Li
• Andy Budd
• “Rands”
• Anton Peck

Of course, there are many other people attending that I’d like to see again or finally meet in person; those are just the ones I could find blog posts from.

Here’s my tentative schedule for the panels and parties I plan to attend. For many of the time slots, I’m double or even triple booked. This just means I either: a. Haven’t made up my mind which panel/event to attend or b. Plan to try to check out more than one in the same time slot. If you’re going to be there too, whoever you are, I’d love to get a chance to say hello. Just drop a comment here or swing by my book reading. I’ll be giving a presentation featuring a practical example of how to apply the information from my book and then hanging around the book store to sign copies - if anyone wants their book signed. (Sorry for the “-” disclaimer…it still just feels so weird/humbling to say I’ll be signing copies of my book.) Fell and broke two bones in my left hand last night, so it looks like I won’t be signing anything unless you want some right-handed chicken scratch. :( Also, I have a special treat for the first 74 people who can tell me “…some trivial bit of info that can’t be found online…” There was 75 special treats, but I ATED ONE. You won’t know if you don’t go…

Update: got a cast to match my business cards.

Tuesday March 13th, 2007 - Continuing the trend of meeting cool people, I just got back from lunch with Mark Huot, Dan Mall, and Kevin Cornell. I can’t quite remember the name of the place where we ate, but it had a cigarette machine and the only video game was “Big Game Hunter II”; therefore I can assure you it was an authentic Austin establishment. I had a great time hanging out with those guys and I must say that Kevin is not nearly as eccentric a person as I expected him to be.

It feels a little weird to be updating this post now. Over the last few days, I’ve been updating when I get up in the morning, before going to any panels. That, of course, is only part of the reason I hadn’t made it to a 10am panel since Saturday. Today was intentionally different though. I got back to the hotel at a reasonable time last night this morning, woke up bright and early, ate a good breakfast and made it to the convention center early enough to get a close seat for Mark Boulton and Richard Rutter’s panel, “Web Typography Sucks”. Although this was one of my favorite panels so far, it quite honestly made me feel like crap. As Kevin said at lunch, “Now I need to go and fix all the type on my website.” My sentiments exactly. While these more technical design panels really challenge me to grow as a designer, it’s admittedly easier to sit through the lighter, fluffier panels that make me smile and nod. I also attended a panel called “Design Aesthetic of the Indie Developer” this morning with Nick Bradbury, John Gruber, Shaun Inman, and Michael Lopp. I didn’t really know exactly what to expect based on the description, but it ended up being a very well moderated view into the working process and experiences of each of the panelists.

Now that I’ve finally started getting used to this absurd schedule of panels and parties, it’s almost time to head back to South Carolina. On one hand, I’m a little bummed that it’s over, but I miss my wife and know that I am going back home as a better designer with many more friends and connections than I would have had if I decided not to go at all.

Monday March 12th, 2007 - Just to keep it short and sweet, yesterday was another day of the same Awesomosity, which is actually a term I picked up in James Archer’s “The Business Side of Webdeign” panel. Jonathan, Sally, Dustin and Cameron did great in their “Uniting the Holy Trinity of Web Design” panel and during the talk, they gave away a few signed copies of my book! After that last panel, it was off to bowling, which totally RAWKED. Thanks Brian! We were supposed to pay about $10 each to bowl, but thanks to a generous contribution from the awesome guys at nclud, the whole event was free! That was a fun night, and as with the last update, I’ve posted the latest photos to the amesnjas sxsw07 gallery.

Sunday March 11th, 2007 - Sorry to keep repeating the same things over and over again, but yesterday I met a lot of awesome people, attended awesome panels, and made it to a couple awesome parties. As I’ve been meeting people, the first thing they always ask is whether this is my first time at SxSW. When I tell them it is, I usually get a smile and a story about how overwhelmed they were the fisrt time they came. This may sound cliche, but the thing that really blows me away here is the sense of family-like, communitiy. For example, after the last panel yesterday, I was headed out of the conference center with Dustin and saw a guy with a UF shirt on and stopped to yell “Go Gators!” That’s how I met Varick Rosete and the rest of the awesome team from nGen Works. I ended up having dinner with those guys and chatting about work, school, and life in Florida. After that we all headed to the Frog Design party where I met back up with a bunch of other people I’d met earlier and introduced myself to Cindy Li who happened to know Varick from UF. It seems like everybody knows (or at least knows about) everybody else here, and that’s what makes it so special. Molly Holzschlag really hit the nail on the head when she called it a tribal gathering, because that’s exactly what it feels like.

I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep last night, but I’m looking forward to another crazy day of people, panels, and parties. My personal goal for today is to slow down a little bit, breathe deeper, take more pictures, and hopefully bowl some strikes!

Saturday March 10th, 2007 - Yesterday was a ton of fun. Had lunch at the infamous Iron Cactus, found out “How to Rawk SxSW”, and met a ton of people who I’ve known via their website for the first time in real life. Of all the business cards I picked up yesterday, Steve Smith has not one, but two of the coolest cards I’ve seen. As a wannabe print nerd, I’m highly impressed by coated papers, spot varnish & die cuts. One of my coworkers at Cyberwoven designed some rad ones with a really heavy stock and a spot varnish, but they weren’t quite ready by the time I left. Enough about business cards and print nerdery though, it’s time to get to the first panels.

Friday March 9th, 2007 - After a long “morning” of driving, flying, transfering, cabs, and registration lines, I’m finally here in Austin, sitting in a conference room at the very first panel of SxSW - “The Real Story Behind Snakes on a Plane”. I’m not sure what this panel is all about, but I’m tired of…planes and every 14th word is mother f*ing, so I’m taking advantage of the free wifi to write a quick “Woohoo, I’m at SxSW!” post. I’ve already met some cool people and I look forward to meeting many more. Ok, that’s all for now. I’ll update this post with the lowdown from Austin.

Well, it’s been over a month since my last post, and although there’s been a lot going on, I haven’t had much time to write about it. At my full time job we had a client application project that seemed pretty straight-forward so we decided to use the opportunity to get our feet wet with Ruby on Rails. I have a LOT to say about that, but when I haven’t been coding, I’ve been writing a book for Sitepoint. Although I can’t give away too many details, I can say that it’s basically going to be a design book for programmers and will be similar in writing style to the Color for Coders article I wrote for them a while back.

Between these two projects I’ve literally been working 12-15 hours a day for the past couple months. Fortunately though, I got to take a bit of a break this weekend while my wife’s mom and maw-maw (grandmother) came up to visit from Florida. While they were up we took a little road trip into North Carolina. We went gem hunting at the Cowee Mountain Ruby Mine, had BBQ sandwiches and listened to some bluegrass music at the Franklin Folk Festival, spent the night in Asheville, NC and the whole next day touring the Biltmore Estate.

If you haven’t been to the Biltmore before and are in the Asheville area, I highly recommend it. Even though the tickets are a little pricey, this place will blow you away with it’s grandeur, intricacy, and history. There are plenty of far-away photos of the exterior floating around the internet, but below are a couple detail shots I took. Unfortunately, taking pictures inside the house was prohibited, so the shot of the glass roof in the Winter Garden is one of the only decent indoor picture I have. You can click on the two images below to get to their entries in our zenphoto album.

As we walked through this ginormous house, we learned a lot about it’s history, how it was constructed, and how it operated. One of the most fascinating things about the home (to me at least) is how technologically advanced it was. Although Thomas Edison didn’t introduce the incandescent light bulb until 1879, the house was wired for electricity and electric lighting when construction began only ten years later in 1889. Since they didn’t know whether the country would use alternating or direct current, it was actually wired for both. The Biltmore house also featured such advancements as refrigeration, central heating, elevators…and a bowling alley. It’s really amazing.

One spooky thing kept bothering me though. Whenever I saw pictures and paintings of the estate’s young builder, George Washington Vanderbilt II, I couldn’t help but think that he looked strangely familiar. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but I kept thinking he looked like famed web designer, Jason Santa Maria. A little flickr research turned up this photo of JSM by John Gruber. When grayscaled and placed side-by-side with a portrait of Vanderbilt, the resemblances are striking.

So striking in fact, that I believe George Vanderbilt didn’t actually die of appendicitis. Instead, I think it’s reasonable to believe that he created a time machine and is still around today. Those designer “prescription” glasses aren’t fooling anybody. I’m on to you Mr. Santa Maria…aka Stan, aka Mr. Vanderbilt.

As native Floridians, Amy and I aren’t used to all this cold weather. We were planning on driving down to our hometown of Vero Beach, Florida today, but when we woke up yesterday and it was 21° outside and looked like this…

…we knew we had to get outta there. We packed up as soon as I got off of work and hit the road by 4:30pm on Thursday. There was quite a bit of traffic on the roads till about 9:30, and then a 3-to-1 construction lane closure around Daytona slowed us down a bit on I-95, but we rolled into town at about midnight.

We’ll be in Vero through New Years, so I brought my workstation with me. I thought I’d post a picture of my temporary office. Yes, there’s actually palm trees, ferns, and green grass outside - quite a contrast from the Icy Tundra in South Carolina. Maybe I should post a picture of the pool too! :) Merry Christmas.

Ames and I have been pretty big on the weekend home improvement projects, but the more we get moved into our house, the more we realize that we need “things”…things like window coverings for our bedroom…and living room furniture. You know, expensive things. The types of things you want to look nice and cohesive when you have a home, but don’t want to pay a lot for. With that in mind, we made the 3 hour trek to the nearest Ikea in Atlanta, Georgia on Saturday.

Amy in the parking garage at Ikea.

For those who have never been to an Ikea store, don’t think furniture store, think theme park. The place has a parking garage, parking attendants, two restaurants, child care, and escalators you can ride with a cart. This isn’t the type of place you can spin through on your way home from work, but the products they have are well designed, unique, and inexpensive. Unfortunately, they were out of stock of the sofa set we were planning on buying, which was the main reason for the trip. We did make it worthwhile however by picking up lighting, shelving, and some dinosaurs, among a bunch of other cool stuff.

…and yes Paul, I had the Swedish Meatballs. They were tasty indeed.

Ames and I got back from our vacation with her family on Tuesday, and I had an opportunity early this morning to get the pictures posted on amesnjas. The pictures there are a good summary of the vacation, but since there are so many, I thought I’d post the highlights here.

On Saturday, we all went out for an early dinner at the Rainforest Cafe in Downtown Disney. The food was awesome, the atmosphere is out of this world, but embarrassing Alina on her birthday was priceless.

After eating at the Rainforest, the whole family made the hike around the Downtown Disney lake to the “West Side” for an awesome show at Cirque du Soleil’s La Nouba. La Nouba is a permanent attraction at Downtown Disney and is well worth the price of admission. Words can’t describe a Cirque show…you have to see it…so that’s all I have to say there.

On Sunday morning, we all got up and spent the day at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. At first, we though we would skip out on this adventure, but it ended up being a lot of fun. All of the Disney parks are so far over-the-top with their atmosphere and attention to detail and Animal Kingdom is no exception. (I know, I should be posting pictures of animals here, but I liked the picture of the tree. For animals, visit the amesnjas page.)

When we weren’t out at shows,parks, or restaurants, we were either at the Coronado Springs Resort pool, or playing board games in our room. Here’s a picture of Amy’s dad trying to make “spaghetti and meatballs” out of Cranium clay.

Since we were there for the 4th of July, we thought we would take advantage of the awesome Magic Kingdom fireworks show. The question was where and how we would do so. We decided that a great place to see the show would be from the Polynesian Resort, which is across the 7 Seas Lagoon from the Magic Kingdom. From our resort, we took a bus to the Kingdom, and then the monorail to the Polynesian. We created a “camp” in the lobby which overlooks the lagoon, ordered drinks and appetizers and waited for the show…

…and what an awesome show it was. After the fireworks were over, we took an alternate route back to our resort to avoid the exodus from the park. We were “lucky” to be aboard Penny’s bus to Downtown Disney, and from there we were able to catch a ride back to Coronado Springs. Needless to say, we slept in the next morning.

I didn’t want to leave for the holiday weekend on such a negative post, especially considering the circumstances. Today at 4pm, Ames and I are jumping in the car and driving down to Orlando to meet up with her family for a 4-day 4th of July vacation. We’re staying in Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort for the entire time, and although we don’t plan to hit up any of the major theme parks while we’re there, our weekend does include reservations to the Cirque de Soleil show, La Nouba. Amy and I have actually seen La Nouba before, but if you’ve ever been to a Cirque show, you know there’s always more to see. Although I’m pretty sure pictures in the show are prohibited, I’ll be sure to take a bunch over the weekend and I’ll be back to posting (and working) on Wednesday.

Ames and I returned late last night from our week long vacation/househunting trip to South Carolina. We took a detour on the way up for a full-day of Class IV white water rafting on the Chatooga River, and camped out 4 of the 5 nights that we were up there to save money. Two of our nights camping were spent at Chau Ram County Park, where our site (#3) overlooked waterfalls on the Chauga river and had one of the most spectacular views in the park. The other two nights of camping were at Sesquicentennial State Park in Columbia...which featured shotty bathrooms and the sounds of the highway at night. We had planned to stop for a day in Charleston on the way home, but by last night, we were ready to get back to Gainesville.

We had a lot of fun, hit up a lot of our favorite places to eat, and probably saw about 75% of the houses for sale in Columbia. We bought a book entitled 100 Questions Every First-Time Home Buyer Should Ask to read on the ride up and thought we were going to be able to do it all ourselves. After ending up in a few bad neighborhoods, finding houses that were already sold, and realizing that buying a home remotely was going to be really tough, we ended up deciding to get a buyer's agent. Although we haven't bought a house yet, our agent has a pretty good idea of what we're looking for now, and will check out anything new that pops up on realtor.com and fits our needs.

It's crazy to me that Amy will be starting her PhD in August and that we will be moving as early as mid-July. It doesn't seem like we've been here in Gainesville for two years, but our anniversary is coming up on July 16th, and we've been planning this for a while. It feels good to be headed somewhere new but there's so much to do before we get there.

For anybody out there looking for an adventure, the “Wild Cave Tour” at Mammoth Caves in Kentucky is awesome! I appended 2004 to the title of this post because I would most definitely do it again next year.

The cave system at Mammoth Cave National Park is the largest in the world with over 630 miles of known tunnels and passage ways. To give you an idea of how much that is, we spent about 6 ½ hours in the caves and covered 5 ½ miles of it. Most of the tours at the park involve walking through the well-lit, even-surfaced, chasms and avenues in the cave system. I’m sure these would be nice if you were breezing through Kentucky in your travels, but to really experience the caves, you need to crawl through areas like Bare Hole, Kathleen’s Crawl, Cheese Grader, Hell Hole, and Hooter Alley. It’s only then that you get to see amazing things like Cathedral Domes, Otter Slide, The Lion’s Head, Lida’s Pass, Big Break - and of course the rock formation that looks like the Starship Enterprise.

You can see most of the pictures I took on my trip at Amesnjas, but here are a few of the best.

• The before-picture of our crew in front of the bus that would take us to the Carmichael Entrance to begin our Wild Cave Tour.
  
• Doug squeezing his way out of Bare Hole. This path got its name from the stories of explorers needing to remove clothing in order to make it out the other side.
  
• Obviously, the lighting scenario underground isn’t the best for photography. This is the best shot I could get in Cathedral Domes.
  
• One of the most interesting holes was called Shotgun. You could choose between a tight squeeze in the top path, or a somewhat easy crawl through the very wet bottom barrel.
  
• My favorite crawl on the trip was called No-Name Pass. The width of the tunnel is about 5 or 6 feet, but the height narrows down to exactly 9 inches before you come out. This is so tight that you can’t even turn you helmet vertically to see where you’re going.
  
• …and here’s the after shot. We were all tired, hungry, and ready for a hot shower!
  

Woke up this morning to find out that I made Jason Santa Maria's Oddities and Diversions list. There I am, right there between Rogue Taxidermy and Sacfree Underwear! Thanks, Jason!

Over the last few months I have been doing such a great job of convincing myself and my co-workers that I couldn't afford to go on their annual caving trip to the Mammoth Caves in Kentucky. Then last Friday after a few more persuasive cost conversations with Kent, I cracked. I said I'd ask my wife, and she said GO! So I bought the necessary thick socks, waterproof boots, elbow pads, and snack food, and I am ready to roll!

We leave this morning in a rental van on an 11 hour drive, cave all day Friday, and come back to Gainesville on Saturday. This isn't "Walk around and see the pretty stalactites." caving either. We're going on the Wild Cave Tour - a 6 hour, 5.5 mile trek of free climbing, crawling, twisting, sliding, and squeezing through tight spaces and bat filled caverns. I didn't really understand why Amy didn't want in :), but how could I not go for a trip like that?

Yesterday started out with much anticipation and excitement as we signed our lease and picked up our new keys. Those feelings continued all through the work day, after which we went to the new place and worked until about 12:30 last night cleaning and building a couple new furniture items.

This morning, Amy took off for work at about 7:40AM as usual, and I felt compelled to do more moving, so I loaded up the futon frame that we retrieved from a dumpster, and a few other boxes and took a load to the new place before heading to work. Tonight we're taking a short break to go to the first meeting of an intramural softball league that we're planning on joining... and then it's back to moving! Phew! :)

This would have been a great weekend to work on my NESdrive project, but I'm going camping at Juniper Springs for the weekend with Amy, my brother Jered, and his girlfriend Aimee. I would say that I'm disappointed...but I'm not really. I need fire, and smores, and canoeing, and stuff. So I'll be getting back to the project when I return.