I’m scheduled this afternoon to attend a pre-conference seminar. From the conference website:

Breaking the Frame of Web Design
Presented by Fritz McDonald, Creative Director
In terms of innovation, the Web is opening up possibilities in a way it hasn’t done since the great dot.com age. Yet, in spite of these gains, many Web sites are only minimally engaging. When it comes to graphic design for the Web, we’re stuck in the frame-a visual approach that cordons off content and photography into neat, highly visible quadrants and may have had its origins in the ‘frameset’ technology developed by Netscape that once dominated site design. In this presentation, we’ll talk about what it means to break the frame of Web design, examine sites that have successfully done so, and explore new graphic design approaches that can help move your site out of the box.

So stay tuned for a report on that. In the meantime, I had the morning to kill.

At about 10:00, I made the 2.5 mile hike to South Philadelphia from the hotel at City Center to visit the birth place of the Cheese Steak. The corner of South 9th St and East Passyunk Ave, just South of the Italian Market, features Pat’s King of Steaks and Geno’s facing off across the intersection.

(Pat’s)

(Geno’s)
Walking from 9th and Market into South Philly was interesting, because the street got progressively dirtier and less polished. The Italian Market was a cascade of sights and smells. Flashy street stalls, the scent of spices and open gabage, and a mix of Italian, Hispanic, Asian, and African American faces. Everyone there looked like they could tell some interesting stories. I passed a car unloading students in the outfits of a culinary school, a woman leading a group of young school children and whistling to them like the pied piper, and a man in a New York Yankees hat that waved a switchblade and yelled through the window of a passing escalade.

I got to Pat’s at 10:40, just in time for brunch. I ordered a provolone steak wit’. Here it is, the genuine article:

Afterward, I picked up a mushroom steak wit’ to carry back to the hotel for lunch. From there it was another 2.5 mile hike back. Fortunately all the walking helped me build an apetite.

This evening I’ll have a report from the pre-con seminar.

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From ‘A Softer World’

There is an argument made against privacy that says someone who isn’t engaged in criminal behavior has nothing to hide. This method of thinking allowed the US government to slowly sap away our civil liberties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–many have just accepted that trading privacy for security is acceptable and used the “nothing to hide” argument to rationalize what was, essentially, a decision based on fear. However, limiting the government’s ability to intrude in our private lives is easy compared with attempting to control how personal information spreads on the internet via gossip. Rather than spies or wiretaps, gossip is often gathered by those we trust and spread online by people who don’t understand or appreciate the potential for the damage it can do. In reality, privacy is about much more than concealing wrongdoing.

Internet-based abuse (‘cyberbullying’) and privacy / relationship issues are still massively misunderstood. The complexities of online sociality are probably the biggest ‘generational divide’ between modern teens and adults. To help put it in perspective a bit, here are some numbers…

I HAVE A MYSPACE ACCOUNT!!1!