KathyMarks.com

This was my first year at SXSWi, and now that I've experienced four solid days of Geekness, I hope to make it an annual appointment on my calendar. I had a great time...

I'm just now catching up on the controversy generated by Kottke's post on the lack of Gender diversity at web conferences and Eric Meyer's response (that event coordinators have trouble finding qualified women speakers). The truth is, I'm tired of this old dialogue. I actually don't want to discuss this issue with men at all. Frankly, I feel that men don't really have a place in the solution to this problem, and so I'd prefer to leave them out of the discussion altogether...

If you're a Mac user who's stuck using a Microsoft Exchange Server at work like I am, you're probably drooling over Google Calendar, too. The other day I got so frustrated, I decided to replace Entourage with Gmail and Google Calendar. It's not a perfect system. I obviously have trouble scheduling meeting rooms—but then I had that problem with Entourage, as well. If you want to give Google a try, here are the steps I went through...

It's taken me a couple of weekends and late nights, but I finally upgraded this blog to Drupal 5.1. Upgrading should probably be tedious, but the truth is I enjoy it. It's a good excuse to clean up some of the dumb mistakes I made in the last go 'round and have been putting off correcting. Like a digital version of spring cleaning, I shook the dust out of the old modules, sorted through and tossed out the junk that's been piling up over the winter, and generally gave the whole place a good scrub and polish. There's something very satisfying about sitting in the middle of a spic-and-span, orderly Drupal site.

If we're talking web design, the answer is everything. Don't believe me? Ask Kathy Sierra. She'll tell you there's one way to be successful on the web—create passionate users. And the only way to do that is to be passionate yourself.