One of Austin's claims to fame is its bats. Went to some great sessions yesterday, but the highlight of the day was my evening excursion, with about 50 other people from the conference and hundreds of locals and tourists, to see more than a million Mexican free-tailed bats emerge from under a downtown bridge a few blocks from the hotel. They were very hard to see as individuals; it was more like a continuous stream of insects heading out over the trees along the river. Very cool.

Posted by lynda at 09:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday started off with delightful serendipity. At the breakfast buffet I met Ginny Redish, an original guru of usability practice. It was one of her books I encountered about ten years ago that turned me on to the subject when I was preparing to teach at George Brown. The day's session was a pre-conference tutorial by Todd Warfel on persona development, a topic I am actively interested in. I came away with some good advice and more confidence in what I've been doing in persona work. It was a workshop session, so we got a chance to play in small groups. I have to say our group did the best job of generating a persona in half an hour! I managed to hit the bookstore on the lunch break and got Bill Moggridge's book. Wednesday's sessions start off with the conference keynote by Canadian UCD superstar Bill Buxton.

Posted by lynda at 09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Getting here seemed to take all day, but only because of the pre-flight nonsense at the airport and the waiting in between actual flying. Dallas was 34 degrees but I never left the terminal to verify that and Austin is apparently 33, but I was whisked by air-conditioned hotel shuttle to this excessively air-conditioned hotel, so what do I know? I made a beeline for the conference's welcome snack table and settled down in a free wifi spot with power plug to do this blog and to down a large soft pretzel and a bottle of Dr Pepper. Does that count as local cuisine?

Posted by lynda at 09:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)