onfocus

I'm going to be in Portland at various times this week taking in the sights and sounds of the Open Source Conference. I'll even be saying a few words at a breakout session on Thursday afternoon. (For some reason the term "breakout session" makes me think of a dimly-lit room full of people playing these.) If you're going to be at the conference, I'll see you there!

Wow! Freeman, Esther, and George Dyson are going to be speaking on Thursday night morning. The topic is: Infinite in Three Directions: In Praise of Open Thinking.

danah boyd rightfully takes the NYT to task for a recent article about blogging—Demeaning bloggers: the NYTimes is running scared. For some reason this made me think: what if bloggers collectively stopped linking to the New York Times website?

I'm thinking about setting up a registration form like this for this site so I can create a "better online experience" for you. You want a better online experience, right? (Thanks for the inspiration bugmenot!)

There are some grave dangers lurking here in the Pacific Northwest: black widows, rattlesnakes, Starbucks. Those are just a few of the perils that some Scottish geography professors warn their traveling students about—Scottish students visit strange land: the Northwest.

I'm going to start offering prints for a few of my photolog pictures. You can see if a print is available for a particular photo by clicking the "details" link that follows the caption. For example, today's photo—crescent city lighthouse—is available as a print. If you click the details link, you'll see an option to buy the print with PayPal as the last line of the info there.

I recently had some digital photos printed at Adorama and I was very impressed with the results. I used their ICC printer profiles to get the colors right before printing, and I think that made a big difference. People have asked for prints in the past, but I wasn't happy with the quality of prints from digital images. So my recent success prompted me to try offering prints. It's definitely an experiment and I'll let you know how it goes.

I just added an rss feed for my photolog. Someone sent an email requesting one, and I'm not sure why I haven't set one up before. Thanks for the nudge, Dudley. (It looks like Dudley has some photolog-specific features in his RSS reader.)

Today sk and I took the happiest dog on earth for a walk along the Willamette River.







The river was bird-central where we were today. We saw a blue heron, golden eagle, pelican, and a whole flock of vultures. A little sandpiper was "barking" at Luna and didn't seem very afraid—it kept bobbing and flying around her. I was kicking myself for not taking my zoom lens.

A few more photos from Webvisions. Michael Buffington, looking at Cam's laptop, Kevin Smokler on screen, and hanging out in the convention center hallway:









There were quite a few more people attending this year and more panels.

A few more pics from a weblog panel this afternoon, Matt Haughey and Jason Fried:





I'm listening to a design talk with Jason Fried right now. He's talking about improving interface design.

Just got done with a "book signing"—where I didn't actually sign any books—but chatted with the weblog authors behind Considered Design and Blue Hole. I'm now listening to Anil Dash talk about the value of weblogs.

This is pb reporting live from the Webvisions conference in Portland. I was a little late arriving, but ran into Anil Dash right away. I got this shot of him being interviewed by the conference videographer:



Here's conference organizer/consultant Nick Finck watching the interview:



And so far I caught the very end of Ernest's session about design ROI:



I also ran into Portland blogger Cat of frykitty fame, and it was good to finally meet her. I'm currently listening to Matt Owens talk about his media design projects.

Just got back from a trip to Sebastopol, CA. We drove up and down highway 101 instead of taking I-5 so we could enjoy the coastal scenery. We took Luna, and this was her first extended car ride—about 12 hours each way. She did great on the ride and slept whenever she was in the car.

We stopped quite a bit along the way, and had a very relaxing trip. I was reminded how beautiful the great state of Northern California is, and we kept talking about how nice it would be to take even more time to explore the wilderness areas, trails, redwood groves, and campsites we continually saw signs for.



Luna has a lot of fun at the beach, and we stopped at several along the way. She usually hits the sand and wants to run as fast as she can, but the rocky beaches in CA were a bit different. She had the same enthusiasm though, and she could have scrambled up and down rocks all day.



In Sebastopol, Luna had a buddy to hang out with while we were there.



Domino is about five times Luna's size, and Luna was pretty shy at first. After the first day they got along famously.

The dogs weren't the only ones having fun. We had fun with friends and family—here are a couple pics from sk's birthday celebration at her grandma's house.



We split our drive home into two days, and stayed on the coast the last night. We spent about ten hours on the road yesterday and stopped several times to walk around and take pictures. I'll be posting them in the photolog. As much fun as it is to travel, it's always nice to get home and sleep in your own bed. Though I bet Luna would do it again tomorrow if she could.