Got a story to tell? Longtime Canary client, First Person Arts, recently announced a new competition for memoir and documentary artists. First Person Impressions invites artists to tackle the first person story through three artistic mediums: the written word, video, and photography. Artists are challenged to find universality in the personal, make the exotic familiar, shock and amaze, or pause to reflect, all while crafting an engaging and true tale around a slice of real life. Everyone with a true story is encouraged to enter. Submissions for the competition are now being accepted through August 15th.

Check it out online here: www.impressions.firstpersonarts.org.

This is how Philly celebrates Independence Day. Our best-known Ben Franklin impersonator and a Betsy Ross impersonator get married in front of a bunch of tourists while our mayor officiates. And they promote the heck out of it. Brings a tear to your eye, doesn’t it?

Join us at the Rosenbach Museum & Library today between Noon and 7 p.m. to celebrate the 16th annual Bloomsday. The Rosenbach, home of James Joyce’s original manuscript for Ulysses, holds this Philadelphia tradition every year on June 16th, drawing hundreds of friends, neighbors, Joyce enthusiasts, book-lovers, and curious passersby to Delancey Place. Bloomsday is free and open to the public and features readings on the steps of the museum from some of the city’s most interesting business, creative, and media personalities, along with performances from Academy of Vocal Arts singers and a special exhibition of Joyce materials. You can find a full list of readers, including Governor Ed Rendell, here.

Ahh, intentions. I’ve had plenty of good intentions in the past. Last weekend I had the good intention to keep up a daily blog of my trip to SXSWi 2008. Check my last post to see how that went. Oh, you’re back so soon? Yeah, that’s because I only did one day. One day! That’s pathetic. Clearly I was foolish to pit my blogging stamina against the awesome attention magnet that is SXSW. What with the daily panels and nightly parties it’s hard enough to stop for food. Forget sleep. Forget the home life you leave with the baby and all. I’ve swallowed the red pill (or was it blue?) and there’s no stopping now. I’ll have to reconstruct my experience from this pile at the bottom of my suitcase. Party invites, tattered receipts, piles of business cards, strange swag (Opera beer cozies?), twitter tweets, and this awkward tattoo will have to do.

Day Two

So to pick up where I left off, Day Two started off with an excellent panel from Jason and Rob on design critiques with clients. Good stuff, and some great tips on how to keep the meeting focused and not compromise on a weaker design for the sake of immediate gratification. Like, don’t let the client mix and match from different comps because that will usually make the end design weaker. And it’s funny when they make fun of each other.

Then I stayed in exactly the same spot for Magic in User Experiences with Jared Spool: Another highly satisfying presentation. But how could it not be when you’ve got mind reading and card tricks peppering your user experience philosophy? Spool illustrated how the most satisfying user experiences completely hide all the stuff that makes a site work that they don’t need to know about. Give your users something fun and they won’t notice that they’re doing anything particularly sophisticated or hard.

After that my memory gets a little fuzzy. Kathy Sierra made some excellent arguments about seducing your users by doing a good job of getting out of the way and letting them do what they want with your site or product. I’ll have to catch the podcast to remember what exactly those arguments were, tho.

Then it’s off to Data as Art. Pretty.

That night we enjoyed the open bar and a slightly rainy courtyard at the Lifehacker/Gawker party. I’m always happy to rub elbows with Gina, even if I have to also rub elbows with some weird furry. (Sorry, no pics of that guy. Let’s just say that when a dude walks in wearing a plush cowl, commotion follows. )

Day Three

After a late night we couldn’t get to any panels on time. So we joined some other designers for lunch. When we got back we hung out in the halls to talk shop with a bunch other site builders. While deep in a “Microsoft IE is ruining our lives” discussion I got to meet John Resig, who invitedus to a rad little party that Mozilla was throwing. They were having a contest where everyone proposed ridiculous Firefox plugins, and our own John Refano took one of the first prizes. Score! He walked away with a very sweet laptop bag and a mention in Resig’s blog. I was psyched to score one of the Screaming Monkeys floating flying around.

Then we headed over to the British Booze-Up at Shakespeare’s Pub. Total f-ing mad house. This would not have been a good night for the fire inspectors to show up, as the place was packed so full that you literally couldn’t walk across the room, and the cumulative body heat made the upstairs balcony stifling. It was so packed that it almost teetered over into being no fun, but then we ran into someone new to chat up and it was all good again. John and I were jazzed to meet the creative director of one of our favorite sites, last.fm, and talked to her about her company, work, and London (where Megan and I took our pre-baby vacation last April).

Then we were off to the Iron Cactus for a party thrown by a Drupal design company, Raincity Studios, along with some other Vancouver companies. This was where the geeks lost all control. Spring Break was almost over, most of us were heading out the next day, and it was the last chance to do some damage to your body and reputation. Folks were booty and break dancing in the pool of spilled alcohol. John got in there a bit, but typical sober me hung off to the side and took it in with the rest of the not-quite-sloshed. Christian Metts, in particular, and I were deep into a conversation on fatherhood in the midst of this nerd-debauchery. I’m pretty sure everyone was having the greatest time of the weekend.

Day Four

I’d love to say that it just got crazier from there, but I don’t think anyone was up for it. John and I had one panel we wanted to catch, and then the plan was to hang out with folks in the halls until it was time to head to the airport.

CMS Roundup was nice, if only to see all the Drupal love in the room. We still have a ways to go in converting SXSW into DrupalCon, but I talked to many people who either used or were evaluating Drupal, or needed folks who do use Drupal. And that’s good for us.

Then after we hooked up with Christian again for lunch, we came across a construction of Bloxes about to be torn down. I immediately lost 15 years of accumulated maturity and went into Godzilla mode. We all took the spare Bloxes and built up our cardboard Tokyo. I built out the tallest tower, and Christian made three connected towers. Then we all lined up, and it was time to bring it all crashing down. That was a pretty satisfying way to end SXSW.

I’ve been back from SXSWi for a little bit now, so I thought I’d write a recap before it fades into the sunset of my memory.

It was my first time there, and my first time at any web conference, actually, so everything was 100% fresh for me. On day one the airline lost my luggage (Damn you, American Airlines!) but everything was smooth besides. I got myself checked in, found some great vegetarian enchiladas, and hit an opening night party (Where they accidentally served this non-drinker a Jack and Coke in place of a Diet Coke. That was a big gulp of surprise!)

SXSWi was a blur of panels and people, business cards and food, and parties. I couldn’t possibly set it all down here and convey how inspiring and fun it was. I’ve never had so much energy on so little sleep. It’s invigorating to be around around literally thousands of web pros. Most of us do our daily work alone or in small teams, and it’s incredibly refreshing to get together and trade stories, tips, and germs.

Panel-wise, the main standouts were:

• Jason Santa Maria & Rob Weychert’s Field Guide To Design Inspiration - A great show on how to integrate design into your daily life
  
• Mark Boulton and Richard Rutter’s Web Typography Sucks !important - This one wins my award for Best Presentation. Web typography is really in a sad state. Mark and Richard did an excellent job and showed me the path to redemption. Do yourself a favor and check out their slides and the podcast of the panel.
  
• Alec Cove’s Beautiful Algorithms - As is evidenced by the fancy leaves in this site, I loves my algorithms. This was a treasure trove of inspiration.
• Jim Coudal and Brendan Dawes’s Short Attention Span - Use your ADD to make a profit!
  
• Jeremy Keith and Derek Featherstone’s Ajax Kung Fu Meets Accessibility Feng Shui - I had to buy Kieth’s book after this one. (Ka-ching for Kieth!) He laid out a very smart workflow for AJAX that degrades gracefully.
• Matt Mullenweg’s Scaling Your Community - He started Wordpress, so pay attention kids.
• Kevin Rose and Kent Nichol’s (among others) Future of Video on the Internet. - You know it’s at least going to be a fun panel when there’s a drinking game involved. All the panelists had beers. Take a drink if someone says ‘paradigm’, another when someone asks a question.

Other Highlights:

• Real Mexican food! Not like the bland ‘philly style’ stuff I get around here. You really can’t go wrong, at least not at any of the places I chanced.
• Lifehacker party / meeting Gina Trapani at her book signing - Lifehacker is my blog of choice. I sometimes worry that I waste more time reading it than their tips save me. I had Gina sign the page in her book where she introduces her Todo.txt system. That little guy has changed the way I work.
  
• The Drupal session at BarCamp - Easily the most fun “party” I went to. How cool is it to hang around with other Drupalers and actually get smarter while the free drinks are flying around!
  
• Bowling, which was fun despite my…
  
• Blisters!

I met many charming and attractive people and we had great meals and conversations about life and the web. Way too many to count here, but it was particularly nice for me to meet and hang out with so many Philly folks. I think we might all have been there. There were some I already knew, and some I hadn’t met yet. In a funny way it was like being back at home.

Now I’m going to risk some dirty looks and say that I just don’t get Twitter. Twitter is a service that accepts SMS messages from your phone and broadcasts them to your friends, a group, or the web. (I think.) And it was all over SXSW. Everywhere you turned it was Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. I’m sorry but I don’t see what’s so useful or enjoyable about sending or reading messages about how you’re at some bar or that you just spotted some celebrity. Maybe I’m just too private a person, but I don’t feel the need to send or receive constant micro-updates on my friends. It’s just kind of boring.

And now, please enjoy the Flickr set!

As some of you know, we’ve been volunteering with Girls Rock Philly, the organization working to bring the only rock camp for girls to Philly this summer. We’ll be holding our second fundraising event, Cold Rock The Auction Block, on Friday, April 6^th at 6:00 p.m. at F.U.E.L., located at 249 Arch Street (at 3^rd Street). It’s free and all ages! This is going to be a killer event with a slew of amazing items in a silent auction, plus music from Rarebirds, Amy Pickard, Allison Polans & Friends, Monarch (members of Relay & Aquila Rose), and DJs Dana Bitetti and Jill Carius.

Don’t miss your chance to snatch up some of these cool items (and help a great cause while you’re at it!): The Police sold-out concert at Citizens Bank Park; VIP tickets to a taping of The Colbert Report; Phillies tickets; tickets to Pig Iron Theatre Company’s newest production, Chekhov Lizardbrain; signed copies ofCinderella’s Big Score: Women of the Punk and Indie Underground by music journalist Maria Raha; an autographed Cat Power CD; an exclusive sneak preview performance for an audience of three of Kate Watson-Wallace’s newest site-specific work, Car; a gift basket of fine wines; gift certificates from Ultra Salon; and a speech and language evaluation for a child.

We hope to see you all there!

Lately, Anton Chekhov, the Russian dramatist and doctor famed for his masterful short stories, seems to be popping up all over Philadelphia. Both Villanova University and Arcadia University recently did productions of Chekhov’s play, Three Sisters. Now Pig Iron Theatre Company, the latest addition to Canary’s roster, is gearing up to present the world premiere of their new work, CHEKHOV LIZARDBRAIN, in late March. The play, which draws from the work of Paul D. MacLean (the mind behind the triune brain theory) and Chekhov’s Three Sisters, is a comic mash-up of neuroscience and surrealism. Sounds like the thinking man’s comedy, no?

I remember reading a Chekhov short in a Russian Cinema course a few years ago, but I’ve never read his work extensively. It’s looking like I’ll have to join the Chekhov bandwagon before I get left in the literary dust. Yesterday, I was paging through a January edition of Time Magazine and came across Lev Grossman’s review of J. Peder Zane’s The Top 10, which is basically the ultimate reading list guide created by some of the greatest living authors around. Zane asked the likes of Norman Mailer, Annie Proulx, Michael Chabon and over 100 other celebrated writers to weigh in on their favorites. Time Magazine printed the “all-time, ultimate Top Top 10 list” derived from the lists of all the writers combined and guess who showed up at #9? Anton Chekhov of course, with The Stories of Anton Chekhov. Looks like I’ll have to add him to my reading list for sure. Perhaps he’ll even sneak into my Top 10.

Last week we were thrilled to see that we nabbed a City Paper Choice Award for our work on ColbertNation.com. Here’s what they had to say: Best Surfing the Zeitgeist
“Was there a bigger star in 2006 than Stephen Colbert? The answer is no. And when Colbert ordered his army to www.colbertnation.com, whose handiwork did they see? Yup, the mad html skills of Megan and Mason Wendell at Canary Promotion + Design provide the interweb face for the America’s favorite fake conservative pundit.”

Thanks CP! So Mason and I popped into the CP Choice Award party Thursday night to say thanks and to chat with some of our favorite CP writers - Pat Rapa, A.D. Amorosi, and former staffers Juliet Fletcher, Jenna Portnoy and Lori Hill. (Sorry we missed CP’s talented photog Mike Reagan.) Much love to City Paper, but I was a bit flummoxed by the sort of freaks-on-parade-circus theme they had going on. I think the girls dressed like trees, the guy on stilts, and the many shirtless dudes were at a different party than we were. I feel like the paper’s editorial staff are so down-to-earth and approachable, not to mention that they produce really smart writing, so the party seemed at odds with the paper’s identity to me. Mason said it reminded him of Lollapalooza ‘92. I’m pretty sure we saw Mister Lifto talking to Michael Nutter.

Another exciting night for the Philly theatre community! The recipients of the 2006 Barrymore Awards for Excellence in Theatre were announced last night at the Merriam Theater. Arden Theatre Company and Philadelphia Theatre Company were big winners, but our clients The Wilma Theater walked away with two awards for last season’s amazing Nine Parts of Desire. If you saw Jacqueline Antaramian’s performance, you know that she was not only extremely deserving of her Outstanding Leading Actress in a Play award, but probably deserved a “most remarkable stamina of an actress portraying nine women in one play” award too.

A number of smaller companies were also recognized. Lantern Theatre Company received the honor of Outstanding Overall Production of a Play for Richard III, and Pig Iron Theatre Co, Theatre Exile, and 1812 Productions all won awards.

It’s always fun to see the performances from the Outstanding Overall Production of a Musical nominees, especially since I missed some of them last season. Nova Payton’s jaw-dropping performance of “I’m Not Going” from Dreamgirls tore the roof off the place!

And then there was the afterparty where we all got to eat, drink and be merry. As usual, I spent a good deal of time running around dealing with TV cameras and photographers, but my feet fared a lot better than last year. Above is me with the dapper Aaron Immediato and James Haskins from The Wilma Theater.