After a few days here I have been pleased that we (Segars Communications) all came. Some panels have been great and others have been not so great.

As far as the 2005 Web Awards go, we sadly did not win. The folks at Cloud King took the award for best CSS design.

Right now I am sitting in Humor on the Web and they are bringing up some great points about making a living doing comedy on the net… Makes me think that maybe I should change the direction of this site, maybe it will take a comedic direction soon.

After this panel we are heading to Stubb’s and if you are in the mood for probably the best BBQ in Texas then join us around 12:45pm. I am looking forward to a chopped beef sandwich after a few days of strange foods (well, to me at least).

I will slowly be adding photos to my Flickr account. Stay tuned…

After a 6.5 hour drive we finally arrived in Austin and the night has gone well. We went to the Kyoto sushi bar and had some (surprisingly) good sushi. I am not a big fish fan but the sushi was very good. I had multiple types, from salmon to tuna, and was not dissappointed.

We start tomorrow at 9:30 am with a walk to the conference center and a full day of “panels”. Hopefully, I’ll have a few pictures up on Flickr soon. In the meantime you can check out ElementalInfusion for Josh’s take on our “adventure”.

We (myself, Tim, Josh, Brandon, and Mark) leave for Austin tomorrow for SXSW. We will probably head out of here around 1:30pm and arrive in Austin around 8:00pm. I will have access to my e-mail so if there is something urgent I will still be able to receive it.

Hopefully I will have a chance to write a few posts while the conference is going on.

After reading this article on the possibility of Bono becoming the head of the World Bank I have come to the conclusion that the end of the world may be drawing near.

Artists have no place in politics or in economics, end of story. If they did then we (Americans) would have Alec Baldwin as President and the U.S. would no longer exsist, it would be southern Canada. Now, I have to give Bono some credit, he is a fairly well educated man and he’s given a lot to the “community” but I wouldn’t say that makes him a great business man or financeer.

Then I look at other options for head of the World Bank and realize they are few and far between. There are not a whole lot of options when it comes to who I would want in that position but I know that Bono would definitely not be my first choice…

After making this post I received 8,000 unique hits over a 2 day period, basically 4,000 uniques a day. Pretty impressive, well, for me at least.

I am not sure I have received that much traffic since middle of last year right before the elections and even then the numbers were nowhere close. I have been working on a new posting system and hopefully it will be up soon.

My dad has been in Lubbock visiting and so far it’s been a good time. We went to Cricket’s, a local college hangout and then some friends and I went to Jake’s Backroom to see Reckless Kelly. I was somewhat dissappointed, the show was packed and extremely loud. About halfway through it I was ready to go but had no way to leave so I was stuck.

So far it’s been a good weekend but as of yesterday I felt like I was coming down with the flu and today confirms it. I woke up sore and very stuffed up. I have a review session tonight for my Ethics class and I really need to go but with my body feeling the way it does I am not sure I will be able to sit through it.

I just saw this new Burger King commercial with Darius Rucker, the lead singer from Hootie & the Blowfish, singing “Bacon Cheddar Ranch”. The song is to the tune of “Big Rock Candy Mountain”, one of my favorite folk songs.

I don’t know how to feel about this. I know that Hootie & the Blowfish are still touring and just aren’t as mainstream as they used to be but was this the right move for Rucker? I understand that everyone needs to make money but with this he is kind of selling himself short. The guy has a great voice and has written some great music and why he chose to do the commercial I’ll never know, I guess they were looking at as satirical kind of thing.

The word is out and spreading that Google now offers a movie time functionality in their search engine. If you go to Google and in the search type “movie: name of movie” you will get a list of movie times in your area (at the local theaters). If your zip code has not yet been set Google prompts you to set one so that they can find the best possible movie times.

It’s a pretty interesting feature and we may soon see the disappearance of sites like Rotten Tomatoes. Google is slowly inching its way into a lot of the markets with Froogle, Google Maps, and Google Local. What will they decide to do next? I’d like to see a calendar application (kind of like what Jeremy envisions).

I would love to see some real strong RSS support and maybe even a feed reader. But I guess only time will tell.

I have been using Portable Firefox lately while I am at school. It allows me to keep all of my settings (Bookmarks, themes, extensions, etc.) and runs completely from my 128 MB flash drive.

I have also been trying out Portable Thunderbird for my IMAP accounts. So far I have been pleased.

If you have a USB drive definitely check these out.

I watched The Simpsons yesterday because they were going to announce a character coming out of the closet, which, is a big deal if you’re a Simpsons nerd like me. Well, the episode was a huge disapppointment. Besides the few witty remarks about different subjects the episode was like a lot of others this season, bland and somewhat boring.

Patty, Marge’s sister, was the character to come out of the closet, which if you watch the show is not much of a surprise.

Back on topic, I have felt that the Simpsons has gone down hill ever since Conan O’Brien left the show as a writer. In my opinion he is a lot of the reason the Simpsons was so successful. I have noticed that since he left Homer’s character does not have the “funny spark” that he used to. He lacks the sarcasm that made him great in seasons 5,6, and 7.

I just feel that the writers could do a lot better job of creating content for the show. The way things are going now I can imagine the show being taken off the air on Sundays after this season or next. And maybe that’s what Matt Groening wants so that he can pursue the full length motion picture about the Simpsons.

WordPress 1.5 was officially released today and I am tempted to download it and play with the database and see if there have been any major improvements in the quality of the datatypes.

The one feature that sounds very cool is the “Manage More than Your Blog” one. It allows you manage an entire site through the WordPress administration panel. Very neat.