Quixotic Bravado by Josh Babetski

• @tracibabe How cute, you’re trying to speak geek!

• I accidently slammed my wiimote into the lovesac, scaring the GF. Yes I’m talking about the nintendo system. Sheesh!
• @ryancarson IIRC, it’s cole haan; nike owns them.
• @ryancarson Try http://tinyurl.com/252auu and http://tinyurl.com/ys42hr. If that’s what you’re after, you’ll have names to check in UK shops
• Nice day here. Busted out the Mtn. bike for the first time this year. Anyone know how to put a lung back in?

• Went over to play Rock Band with @AntTheLimey. The game rocks hard, I however need lots o’ practice. I know I’m going to wind up buying it.
• Go Speed Racer. HD trailer says campy, but might not suck: http://tinyurl.com/2brhs2
• My 57lbs of schwag, busted luggage and MQ gear arrived from Austin already. Sent it to office so will have to wait until Monday.

While in Austin, Texas for SXSW Interactive with MapQuest, we had a team participate in the 3rd annual Geeks Love Bowling event. It was a fun night of hanging with peers, but the quality of the bowling was questionable:

I just had my car in for service before going on world tour. Normal scheduled maintenance stuff. Of course cars these days have little lights that go on and in my case a little text display that says “Maint Reqd” when the car hits certain mileage on the odometer.  It seems they failed to reset it last time I was in and yesterday it went off and would not go away — very annoying!

 It was easy enough to get taken car of. I swung by the dealer and on the second attempt they remembered the combination of steps to reset the alert. It’s:

Right-blinker, brake, left blinker, honk the horn twice, put a classical music station on the radio, hold the trip meter, then press start.

 Maybe it was a little simpler than that.  The story here is that it’s amazing what a little light can do to the user experience. By design it’s suppose to do two things: remind the user to keep their vehicle maintained and ensure that the garage has reoccurring business.  The downside of the user experience is not making it easy and intuitive to reset the alert for those of us who do take care of our vehicles, thus creating a negative reaction to the feature. This “lowest common denominator” design is all too common and in my opinion lazy UX design.

• @jasoncalacanis directtv? I used to do the opposite: watch from east coast during west coast airings.
• Ahhh… Home and out for wings. Start SXSW recovery tomorrow.
• Chipping away at the MQ inbox. Goal is to get it under 10 messages by C.O.B.

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• Why you should fire your PR company
• Nullriver Software : Products : Connect360 Your Xbox 360 is capable of playing back your music and videos and viewing your digital photos. With Connect360, your Mac’s ready to share.
• iPhone Dev Center

• at the salt lick rockin’ the BBQ.
• McLovin’ tells me he watched twitches request a table near an outlet to plug in their geekery. Then sit and tweet each other. That’s SO sad.
• @thorpus Glad the word is out at that people are talking about MQ! We’ve now hung out in two states now in the course of a week. Awesome!
• Wrapping up email and packing up for the early AM roll-out. Baby: I’m comin’ home!
• Another SXSW in the bag. See some of you on the next tour stop and the rest of you next year. Stay in touch! Good night Austin, we love you!

• @guykawasaki twitter meet-up lacks host. Meet a bunch of twitters though.
• at adobe party. looking for the adobe people while bad local band is playing.
• just left MS demo for silverlight. Nice stuff!
• at Shakespeares to meet @chip. Going door-to-door tonight.
• @garyvee Try SxNW thing at Iron Cactus around 10ish. Will be there.
• waiting at iron cactus with @justinkeller, @colleencoplick and McLovin’
• @garyvee just rolled me into the Facebook party. Gary is the man!
• Catching up on email. Met a lot of great people tonight and got to hang out with a lot of people I’ve met over the past week!
• Even after late night of happenings, still no slowing down at SXSWi! Sad its last day, but will be happy to get home to GF.
• waiting to do another interview. We’re obsessed with magnet schwag.
• FYI: papa john’s will indeed deliver pizza to the convention center.

• @chipd just got twitter-jacked at the bowling alley!
• There are people protesting Whole Foods in front of the Hilton across from conv.center.
• Workin’ the MQ booth; come by and chat!
• I was interviewed by people in cow outfits today. Made me rethink my career choices.