Went to SXSW, met teh interwebs

Silly me, I thought SXSW was a film and music festival. I went there to talk about DV Rebel filmmaking, but I didn't meet more than a handful of traditional filmmakers. I did, however, meet the internet.

I loves me my podcasts, so it was way cool to meet folks like Veronica Belmont and Joanne Colan, Kent Nichols of Ask a Ninja and Erik Beck of Indie Mogul. I gave a shout out to my Montreal homies Rudy Jahchan and Casey McKinnon of Galacticast who have been putting The Guide to great use on their show, on and off camera. And it is always good to chill with Alex Lindsay of This Week in Everything.

I did feel a bit out of place though (Stu to Joanne Colan over ice cream: "So, what do you do?"). But web celebs are mellow and seem to have a bemused respect for traditional media, if only for its reliance on this strange thing called "money." They welcomed me into their weird world with Twitter and free booze (one is often used to locate the other).

Scott Kirsner, the most excellent moderator of the panel, posted notes on his blog. I too got great feedback from attendees and want to thank all who overcame hangovers and daylight savings time to be there. Now it's back to reality for me, and back to my iPhone podcasting tab for all my new friends.

Damn Good Tacos

Rudy Jahchan of Galacticast gave me an in-person review of that last post: "Least informative ProLost post ever." True enough. So don't expect much more of that.

See?

It's a little "bloggy" for me, but I though I'd test the ability to send crappy photos and misspelled text to the blog from my iPhone. Now you know if I see something amazing at SXSW I can walk into a pole trying to tell you about it.

I'm at SXSW

Kinda forgot to mention it... I'm at South by Southwest to speak on a panel on Sunday. Come check me out if you're here in Austin!

Stay ColorSunc

I have a 30” Cinema Display attached to my 17” MacBook Pro, and often when I return to the computer after the screensaver has kicked in, I find that my display has reverted to some default ColorSync setting rather than my calibrated, gamma 2.2 profile. The visual effect is that the screen is brighter and bluer than I’d left it.

You can fix this manually by opening the Displays section of System Preferences. This little ritual has gotten quite old though, and it finally occurred to me to do some Googling. I found this helpful blog entry that suggested the following Terminal entries:

cd /Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Displays

sudo chmod 664 *

(Standard disclaimers apply any time you use the terminal, execute the sudo command, and go outside on a sunny day.)

This didn’t work for me until I also changed the permissions on the Displays directory (and the other profiles in the Profiles directory too for good measure):

cd ../

sudo chmod 664 *

So far so good—I appear to be free from the forces that seek to revert me to -blech- gamma 1.8 land.

Whenever I encounter weirdness with Apple OSs or apps, I try to report them at apple.com/feedback. Who knows if it helps, but almost all the issues I reported about my iPhone became fixes in later firmware revisions.

(Oh, and of course I realize that I could just turn the screensaver off, but I tend to leave it on with password verifications for security reasons.)