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Mark Newhouse captures part of the social happenings and yours and hers truly. While Nick Finck captures many of the names of people I got to meet also (there were some differences in this list, of course).

Soon to add my own photos from Web2001 and other photos from the trip.
Posted at 10:30 PM.   # 

I am still stuck in some sleep time warp. This is very reminicient of the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco with the stress and then sleep crash.

If you have not found it yet nixlog has infographics of the disasters. A view of what lies ahead from the Washington Post, Afganastan: A Nightmare Battlefield, which seems like another war we could never win. It seems like rounding up the 100 to 200 of Bin Laden's cell leaders and deputies would be easier.

Christina is back putting forward IA matters.

The New York times had a light tech article from last Thursday.

O'Reilly has released the DocBook under GNU License, offers Confessions of an Accidental Programmer as an intro to its Perl for Website Management, and a 2nd edition of Web Design in a Nutshell is due out within weeks and is said to have been largely rewritten with mostly new content.
Posted at 10 PM.   # 

At the moment Tom Cosgrave is in a bit of a bind and may need a shoulder and a little more. I am hoping Jessamyn arrives home safely soon. There are many more that I met in person that I have found are still in transit to their homes. I wish peace to them all.
Posted at 11:30 PM.   # 

I am home at last. I got to see Pittsburg, PA on my way back, which seems like a good place to visit again.

The airport was quite busy yesterday it took over four hours to get to the ticket counter from getting in line before 5am. The security is very high as they were checking many of the check in bags by hand and all the carry-on bags. Each person was checked twice with the regular metal detector and then a wand and pat-down search. The gate areas were very quiet.

I am very glad to be home.

Once again my flight was cancelled. I am going to try stand-by tomorrow as the flights are getting more regular throughout the day. I have a scheduled flight Sunday, which I hope will get me home.

I may go to the gathering in Golden Gate Park this afternoon, which Megan mentioned.

Peace and hugs.

I should be heading home Friday. It has been wonderful to have such great friends in San Francisco to stay with and have community. I am extrememly thankful that so many friends in NYC and DC are safe. I am still rattled and don't really want to watch another replay on television again. I would like to see my wife, family, and friends on the East Coast, which I am hoping should come as early as Friday night.

My heart goes out to all those who have personally felt loss in this tragedy.

I have been warmed by the global heartfelt sorrow that has been reaching us regarding this horror. I really am speachless and look forward seeing and touching friends at home.

I am still in San Francisco and have heard from most of my New York and DC friends and all are well. Some have amazing stories and most of us are still shaken. I am really missing not being with my wife at times like these. The net is enabling many of us to keep in touch and share gentle humanity.

I am fortunate to have many friends here in San Francisco and to be staying with my frined Rob, one of my friends I grew up with who lives in SF.

Peace and hugs.

New York City and Washington, DC have been attacked. Joy is safe north of DC and our brother-in-law Bob is okay also as he worked in what was the World Trade Center. I am still in San Francisco and not sure at the moment how I will get back home, I may have to drive or take a train.

It may be time to go pull some cash out.

CNet offers an opinon on building better wireless applications. Focussing on the user and how they work with the wireless devices is critical.

My desire is better inter contectivity with other devices so that I can choose how to use the information. I am constantly trying to reuse, for e-mail or postig in the log so that I can find it later and share with others, information I read on various services supplied by Avantgo, which I find to be a great service for me. The interconnection with my PC or to push the link (URL at a minimum) to my PC when I synch or via e-mail to my self would be a great assistance. Currently I am very limited to the reuse of that information that may help me do my job better and may be of assistance to others.

Also in the NY Times OpEds Maureen Dowd points out the media, the President, and Congress all love Big Business. There is something in this that seems like it would extend the right to free press, but it seems that the press, government, and big business are all one happy family. Who is left to oppose and offer informed opposition to protect "The People". "We the People..." begins one of the U.S. most important founding documents, yet the people may no longer actually be heard or considered in the decision manking process. (These are just open thoughts and concerns.)

Sometimes the Economy Needs a Setback OpEd in the NY Times by James Grant, is a rather straitforward assessment of the boom correction. Those of us that watched the boom in the 80s and its demise in 1987 could see this one coming.

There is nothing like a 3 hour lunch with very interesting folks to help keep ones sanity.

I am still in sleep deprived mode. Last night was Fray Day 5, which provided great laughter and intraspection from the story tellers, then bathed in wonderful music from the Walkingbirds. I was so happy to hear the Walkingbirds live, but about the point they came on I found my synapes slowing their firing processes and knew it was time to find the horizontal holding pattern.

This morning I dropped Joy at the airport then made the pilgramage to the Pork Store for a great breakfast. Following this I trekked up to the top of Filmore Street to catch some of the San Francisco Gran Prix bike race, which includes Lance Armstrong. From there it was off to Green Apple Books and fround Richard Saul Wurman's Information Architects (thanks Christina for the heads-up) and Stuart Brand's How Buildings Learn.

One of the things that I has been reaffirmed is the small world that the Web has created. I had lived with this experience since 1996. Even though the world around us tries to tell us that the Web was over-rated it can not take away the extended realm of friends that one makes over the Web or because of the passion to build a better Web. This week in SF has built tactile hyperlinks that allow one to reach out and touch and share the world face-to-face. It has been akin to a human portal. This greatly shrinks the world and brings vast experiences as well as like minds from far away all within reach.

There are so many thoughts still being mulled in my mind and formed from this past week. It should flow out and be recorded in the coming days and weeks. It has been great to hear that others have some of the same concerns and observations about where technology and electronic information flows have gone. Information needs to be useable. In a portable/mobile context there needs to be a connection to other devices to port the information so to use it in other contexts. Infomation is still not ultimately usable in every context or situation and not that usable across these points of context.

A nap and an excersion or two should help bring me back to life.

The going to bed on West Coast Time and waking up on East Coast time finally caught up with me today. I was nap worthy for much of the day and finally caught a few moments of shut eye about 5:45pm.

We wanted to go to Laghi for dinner, here in San Francisco, but when I called to make a reservation, an answering machine picked up and stated that Laghi had closed on September 2nd. I was so bummed, as it went from small cozy restaraunt out on Clement, to a larger venue near Japantown. But, there will not be any fresh pasta and sauces in the near future.

We ended went to North Beach to La Felce, which is an older Italian restaraunt that I had been to while I was in college. It had not changed too much, which is a very good thing. The gnocchi melts in your mouth. The tables on either side of us were speaking nothing but Italian. It was the North Beach I remember.

Tomorrow is the last day of the conference and then it is Fray Day and my turn to enjoy San Francisco. I am already getting ready to take in SXSW, well after a little bit more sleep than I have been getting.

There are a ton of folks that I have met and heard speak that are wonderful and very much on top of the Web Dev world.

Good night.

Last evenings IA/UX cocktail hour put together by Christina and held at Method was fantastic. It was a great sharing event as different perspectives, experiences, and mindsets interacted and we all came away with a better, if not broader understanding of the world of IA/UX. This was a fantastic event and it was great to meet Christina in person (also solved the mystery Amazon Wish List gift, of which I am so greatful).

The wrap-up of the two day intensive course on User Experience Design was great. I came into the two day to help find and fill in gaps in what I know in the process and how to analyse the user research, user testing, information architecture, interactive design, and documentation of the who process. I found I understand a great amount of it and have been implementing it in a manner that is very consistent with what the Adaptive Path folks (and even with what the carbonIQ) practice. One of the elements that came out of this session was the separation of interactive design and information architecture disciplines. These two disciplines have been tethered in my head under the information architecture classification for some time. The approach of the IA is very different than the ID approach and tasks accomplished. The session was also very helpful in better forming mental mapping of the users tasks they expect to happen on the site. The graphic representation of this information was fantastic. I was fully enamoured with the whole of the AP team that presented this information and approaches over the past two days.

Spelling creations are free until they are corrected.

Tonight was a wonderful evening with a dinner at a fantastic tapas restaraunt in the Mission District. The company was wonderful with Heather, Derek, Christina, Jeffery, Carrie, Joy, and myself. I have been taking photos of varying quality this trip and stretching the capabilities of the camera (with out the flash on at least) and I did not think to take a photo as I was so captivated with the converation throughout the evening.

Just before heading to dinner I had had a few moments at a happy hour for folks on the webdesign-L listserv. It was great to meet these folks, but the time with them was far too brief. Although I did get pictures of this event, but they were slightly blurry and will be posted upon my return to the Eastern portion of the country.

My contacts are sticking, so I must head to bed as I need to rest up for the remaining days a head.

The Adaptive Path folks are putting on a great session on Experience Design.

Bandwith and dial-in are proving to be somewhat problematic. I am hoping this is an aberation for just today.

The HP and Compac news really floored me this morning. It is a good, but very overlapping merger.

More later...

I am really wishing I spent the time (first I had to find the time) to put together a photo upload and display system for vanderwal.net before I left. I will post them once I get back, unless I can find some more bandwidth (using a laptop stuck with a 33.6kbps modem).

Today it is off to SF to catch the Giants. Get settled in the hotel and visit friends in Marin. It seems like it may a sleep depravation experiment for the next 9 to 10 days. There are so many people I want to see and meet in person as well as places I would like to get to (there really is no time to just hang out on this trip).

San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area is a wonderful place just to hang out. There are so many places to explore and relax. I had lived and work in SF for five years before moving East, I went to college (a href="http://www.stmarys-ca.edu/">St. Mary's College) in the East Bay, and went to high school over the next couple set of hills. I am still trying to get in touch with a few folks to catch up with in the fragments of spare time I have next Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. I have been using Mail2Web to pull my personal mail while traveling. It dumps in your Web browser and seems to work very well (although it messes with the From line in what you would receive. At least I can read mail and respond. My previous Web host had browser-based mail as an offering. I am missing that to some degree, but not enough to go back.

The trip out was quite painless. I stopped for a burger at Red's Java House, which is an old dockworkers hang out. Burger pattie, slices of real cheddar, chunked onion, mustard, and pickle on a sourdough roll for about two dollars, which can also include a long neck Bud.

More later...

We have another new vehicle on its way to our family, which should be here when I get back from the West Coast. This one is not particularly for me though. Our hard work, you might say, is paying off.

I am looking forward to relaxing some tomorrow on the trip out West and to the Giants game Monday. It has been at least six years since I have seen them play, which is far too long. I have not seen them in the new Park, which will also be a good experience. It will be strange to sit and watch the Giants, not on television or listening to a game off the Internet like I have done the last four summers.

I am going to try and quickly knock out a location post for the TravelBlog. Last night I coded some new functionality that will only display the current month and has nearly all the coding in place so the drop into the regular log will be much easier for me. There were a couple new unused elements that will come into use when this site turns dynamic, probably in October.
Posted at 6 PM.  #