Writing, Painting & Speaking

My last couple posts might indicate that I’ve been wasting a lot of time lately. Honestly though, I’ve been almost as busy as I was while writing the book. Here’s a quick rundown of my latest activities and upcoming engagements.

Writing for Digital-Web

After years of learning from and being inspired by the web professional’s online magazine of choice, I’ve finally contributed an article to Digital-Web. I decided to write about finding and using stock imagery. It’s not a groundbreaking or hotly debated topic, but selecting and incorporating stock is an essential step of the design process that is often skirted by web design educators and authors.
Check it out: Cooking with Stock

Finishing up the Exterior Painting

This has taken way too long, but Ames and I are almost finished painting the exterior of our house. We took your suggestions and went with Scheme #4. Somehow the colors didn’t quite come out the same as my Photoshop mockup, but we still think it looks pretty sharp.

Mental Note: Spending several weekends balancing on an aluminum ladder is not a fun task for the hottest part of the summer.

Speaking at Refresh Augusta

Chris Harrison has driven an hour to be a part of both of our first two Refresh Columbia meetups while at the same time working to get the ball rolling with Refresh Augusta. I’ll be headed down to their next monthly meetup to talk about design for developers.

Speaking at The Webmaster Jam Session

I must have done something right at the 2007 Webmaster Jam Session because they asked me to come back again for this year. The 2008 Jam Session will be in Atlanta, GA on October 3rd and 4th. I’ll be giving a presentation titled Design Disrepair where I’ll discuss the ins and outs of renovating a website.

Speaking at SXSWi 2009?

Well, that depends on two things:

1. How well my panel did in the public voting.
2. Whether or not SXSW fits into the plan for next year.

I submitted the same Design Disrepair panel that I’ll be presenting at the Jam Session. Why? Because it’s going to be a very fun talk with a unique perspective that should be a good fit for SXSW as well. Trust me, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and working on it between all the other stuff mentioned above. Even with this much confidence though, I didn’t promote it because I’m not sure yet if I’ll be going to Austin in March. The last two years at SXSW have been amazing, but it sure eats up the time off and vacation budget. In the 5 years since we got married, Ames and I have only taken one vacation that was longer than a week, and that was only because it was paired with an engineering conference she had to go to. Somehow though, I’ve managed to take a full week off for SXSW twice. So…if my panel gets voted in, I can swing a long vacation with Ames and still have the time/budget for SXSWi, trust me, I’ll be there.