Moleskine Recipe Journal

You know the thing I hate about blank recipe books? They’re usually divided up into sections like Appetizers, Soups & Salads, Entrees, etc. — but there are never the right number of pages in each section. Depending on your personal culinary repertoire,  you might end up with an overflowing Appetizers section, while the Fish section is a ghost town.

One solution is not to prescribe the size of each section at all, but to include tabs that can be stuck in on whichever page the section happens to start on. The trouble is, most recipe books like this are filled in over the course of years, not all at once — so the “last page” of a section is a constantly moving target.

So the ideal cookbook would be one to which you could add extra pages to each section as needed. Perhaps something like this. I’ve got a set on order; maybe that’s what I’ll use it for.

I’m a White Sox fan. Not a rabid one — I’ll attend a Cubs game once in awhile, and I’ll even enjoy it if it’s a decent game. But my heart belongs to the South Side Hitmen. I have a brick from old Comiskey, and a 28-inch Louisville Slugger that the Tribune bewilderingly gave out as a premium the last season there. (Can you imagine 10,000 bats being given away to fans? I don’t recall there being any beatings reported back then, but holy insurance liability.) My favorite player is Carlton Fisk, and I was elated when the Sox went all the way in 2005.

So when I saw the Cubs’ new slogan, “It’s a way of life,” with Wrigley’s iconic Win flag in place of the W, I knew immediately what I had to do.

You may be interested in this as a t-shirt, or perhaps as a stylish bumper sticker. Go Sox.

I’ve been back from SXSW Interactive for a couple weeks now, which has given me some time to digest the experience. It was very different for me this year compared to years prior.

First off, I had a panel this year, and I was feeling very unsure about it. It was The Online News of Tomorrow, and featured some very talented and knowledgeable* people. However, because we’re all very talented and knowledgeable, we’re also very busy, and so we had very little direct communication before the conference — basically a few emails and one hour-long conference call which Jeff Jarvis wasn’t able to attend. This made me really nervous. What if we suck? What if the questions I pose lead to one- or two-sentence (or word!) answers? What if we can’t fill the hour? It had me distracted for the first couple days of the conference, and kept me from enjoying myself and being fully “there” for the panels I attended.

Fortunately, my concerns were completely unfounded. The conversation flowed nicely, and if anything we could have had more time. We fit well into the thread of discussion in the several media-related panels this year, and the only content-related complaint I saw in the Twitter chatter was that we took too long to get to our thoughts about potential business models.

The biggest non-content complaint was that we were yet another panel of white guys. Cinnamon even alluded to it in her talk. It’s a valid complaint, and one I had tried to address. Next time I do a panel, I promise to be more industrious in my efforts.

I was also interviewed in the conference’s Studio SX. It was only a 10 minute thing, and it felt like it went by in half that time. I felt it went OK, but we ended up starting at such a remedial level (one of the first questions was “what’s the difference between an online magazine and a blog?”) that we didn’t get very deep into the supposed topic of the future of online news. Though honestly, I could be wrong — it was over so fast and so very casual that I’ve forgotten most of what I said. The audience seemed OK with it. Hopefully SXSW will post the video somewhere so I can see for myself how it went.

“Content isn’t free to make. There’s a whole iceberg of work involved in creating content.” —Erin Kissane on the New Publishing & Web Content

Despite the self-distraction, I did have a good time. Break Bread with Brad, the memorial party held in honor of our dearly departed friend, Brad Graham, went well. I have a couple hundred buttons left over — 500 was probably more than absolutely necessary. I plan on donating most of them to the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, where Brad worked, for their fundraising use. If you’d like one, please get in touch.

The only official after hours events I attended this year were Happy Cog’aoke, Fray Cafe and 20×2 — and I helped out behind the scenes with 20×2. Otherwise, I spent most nights out with friends at one of the non-event bars — usually the Ginger Man. That’s been the trend for me for the past several years. The official parties tend to be ridiculously packed and kind of lame as a result; it’s hard to have a very good time when it takes forever to get a drink, movement is limited by the crush of bodies, and it’s so loud you end up hoarse trying to talk to your friends. This year’s crop of parties was apparently also marred by “VIP” sections that sometimes separated friends with a chain-link fence.

One of the things I missed about “the old South-by” was the serendipity. The chance encounter that led to an unexpected experience with people you barely know. I had one of those for the first time in awhile this year. Cinnamon had planned to meet up with Lauren Bacon, Alex Beauchamp, Jenny Hart and Vickie Howell at the Hotel San Jose, and I was invited to tag along (Lauren’s boyfriend David did, too). It was a group of amazing people I otherwise probably never would have gotten to spend time with, and it was one of the highlights of my trip. I don’t think I really realized how much I missed it till I had it again; next year, I’ll seek it out.

Then again, there’s always the tug of catching up with friends I only get to see in person at SXSW. That list gets longer every year, and the
refor makes it harder to make room for the unexpected. As much as I hope to break away from my circle of friends and mingle with other groups, it’s hard to do when you’re in the moment.

The second big difference between this year and years previous was the marketing. Yes, attendance was up 30-40 percent this year, but I don’t think I would have noticed that so much if it weren’t for the hordes of marketers — literal packs of people there solely to promote some service or product. It was nearly impossible to walk in or near the conference center without being accosted by a pretty young thing trying to get you to go to a marketing plug or sign up for a contest or hand you a tchotchke. It was obnoxious, and nearly ruined SXSWi for me. If SXSW Interactive is to remain a great conference, that’s going to have to be reined in.

SitBy.Us was a fantastic success, by the way. With nearly 900 panels and events listed on the official schedule, having some way to quickly and easily sort through everything was greatly appreciated by attendees. We got tons of great feedback on improvements for the future, and we’ll be sharing some post-show data and thoughts over on the Weightshift blog once we’re out from under a couple client projects.

I came home with a sinus infection again this year. I wouldn’t blame it on SXSW SARS, though: I think it was the water at the Hampton Inn. I use a neti pot, and I noticed that the water smelled strongly of mildew on the first couple nights we were there. I think I basically inoculated myself with mildew as I tried to keep my sinuses clear. Next year, I’ll use filtered water or something.

Cinnamon and I spent Tuesday night at Alison and Brendan’s place, where we watched Deathbed: The Bed That Eats and scratched Maude’s head. Wednesday morning we went to Gourdough’s for breakfast and enjoyed insane donuts before heading to the airport. Best way to end SXSW yet!

*Boy, “knowledgeable” is a really weird looking word. It’s all sorts of strange letter combos and atypical construction, isn’t it?

It’s been a busy… well, I was going to say week or month, but really it’s been busy all year so far. But the past month has been particularly busy.

I’ve had a big freelance project finish and a new one begin, with a planned deadline of the day before I leave for SXSW Interactive — which is today. (It’s mostly hitting deadline.) Gapers Block is still going strong, and we launched a grant-funded original feature reporting program in January that’s added a bit more to my workload.

But what ate up a lot of my time was SitBy.Us, a web app that helps SXSW Interactive attendees figure out their schedule and share where they’re sitting with their Twitter friends. (More about it here and here.) It’s really taken off — as of right now, we have 1633 registered users, which is probably around 15 percent of this year’s attendees. We’re hoping to see that rise to around 2000-2500 once the conference has begun.

I’m moderating a panel this year: The Online News of Tomorrow, featuring Jeff Jarvis of CUNY, Adrian Holovaty of EveryBlock, Jeremy Zilar of NYTimes.com, and Brad Flora of WindyCitizen in addition to me. Should be a good discussion; whether it’s exactly what we planned it to be, about may be an entirely different matter. Keep your eye out for coverage — and also for my Studio SX interview , on the same subject, with the LA Times’ Mark Milian. Both are this Sunday.

In addition to that, I’m helping out with the Break Bread for Brad memorial celebration Friday night, and with 20×2 on Monday. And who knows what else in the interim.

I’m not the only one in the family speaking this year, though. Cinnamon has a panel of her own, and it’s arguably harder than either of mine. She’s doing a “Future 15” solo talk titled “You Win When They Call You a Bitch,” about fighting sexism with social media. She’s going to be awesome.

So, yeah, a week in Austin at “spring break for nerds.” It’s going to be great. Exhausting, but great.

We had a brief debate about who was Generation X, Generation Y and Millennial Generation. There seem to be varying starting points and cut-offs for each (Gen-X being the closest to settled at this point), and depending on where you look Gen-Y and Millennials may be the same generation. So I thought I’d put some numbers on a chart to show just how much overlap there is. The ranges for Generation X and Generation Y are from Wikipedia — which considers Millennial Generation another name for Gen-Y — while the start date for the Millennial Generation (which may or may not still be gaining members — has anyone named the “Post-Millennials” yet?) comes from MillennialGeneration.org, a project of Futurist.com.

Just reading the Gen-Y/Millennial Gen Wikipedia page gives you an idea of how much controversy there is over when this generation begins and ends, and whether it’s one or two or multiple generations. On the chart, Gen-X ends in 1981 and Millennials pick up in 1982, which makes sense. So why does Gen-Y start in 1976?

What are your thoughts on where one generation ends and the next begins? And what do we call kids born after 2000?