I had a great weekend taking in 5 really great DC destinations and events.

1) Tech Cocktail

Tech Cocktail is a meet up for tech folk to hang out and make connections in a fun venue. It was started by Eric Olson and Frank Gruber. I had the pleasure of meeting Eric. He told me the event was started in Chicago mainly because there was no event like it to have an excuse for the tech community gather. They also made the decision to let the event promote itself through blogs and word of mouth. That decision paid off well because the crowd there turned out to be a wonderful mix of designers, developers, strategists, and startup owners. Most I talked to were really on the cutting edge of new media. It was cool to see such a strong tech community turnout in DC.

2) Fogo De Chao

We had a birthday celebration for my friend, Eugene, at the infamous Fogo De Chao. This restaurant is a Brazilian style meat house. They give you a disc with a green and red side. When green us up you better make sure you are ready. A barrage of waiters carrying large swords with hunks of meat come at you ready to cut fresh pieces right onto your plate. I think I’m still digesting that dinner.

3) Artomatic

Artomatic is yearly event where hundreds of artists install their work in an old DC building. There are performances, too. The art was great. The few music acts I went to weren’t my cup of tea, but there was a great drama group.

4) Dupont Circle Farmers Market

I’m on a farmers market kick. I think buying locally is the way to go. Fortunately, the Dupont Circle Farmers Market has meats, cheeses, and produce galore. And, I ran into Giada De Laurentiis! You know how cooking shows always have the chef walk around checking out outdoor markets? Well I was walking behind Giada from Everyday Italian on the Food Network as she filmed her segment. I followed her around and tried to get some pictures, she probably thought I was pretty sketchy. Oh yea, I also bought at quart of lard from the pig guy! I’m gonna have some tasty veggies!

Oh yea, if you are freaked out by the lard, give this article a read first.

5) Taste of Arlington

Finally, Arlington has its annual Taste of Arlington celebration where all the local restaurants put up a stand and let you sample food. They have a great system where you buy a ticket book that lets you get 6 things at the food fair. I almost couldn’t finish all 6 because of how much food that was. It’s a great way to sample a lot of really different foods. The musical acts there were great, too. Bobby T and the Magic Voyagers, a great Jimi Hendrixish jam band and The Taylor Carson Band, a super fun acoustic rock group, were my favorites.

Here is part two of the tweaks and configurations you’ll need to make to Quicksilver to make it a productivity powerhouse. The focus here is on the bare bones steps to get you up and running so you can see what all the Quicksilver hype is about because the program doesn’t come with a lot of the features preconfigured to work off the bat. Click here to see part 1.

6) Calculator
- In Plugins: Install the Calculator Module
- Open Quicksilver and enter: “.” + “=” + <the equation>
- The period enables free text mode (ie it won’t try to find files
and applications while you type) and the equals sign puts in in
calculator mode.

7) Dictionary
- In Plugins: Install the Dictionary module
- Open Quicksilver and enter: “.” + <the word>
- Tab over and start typing “dictionary”

8. Address Book Contacts and sending E-mails
- In Plugins: Install the Apple Address Book module as well as the
Apple Mail, Entourage, or Gmail module depending what you use
- Open Quicksilver and type the name of the recipient
- Tab over and start typing either “Email” or “Compose”

9) iCal
- In Plugins: Install the iCal module
- Open Quicksilver and enter: “.”
- Enter the name of the event and time information. iCal is pretty
smart and can decipher the key date and time info as long as you
keep to standard date formats

10) Proxies- Access to all menu items from the current application
- Insanely powerful feature. Most of the time you don’t know
keyboard shortcuts but you know pretty much what the name of the
menu item is that you want. Now you can just start typing that
in Quicksilver to call up any action in the program you’re in.
- In Quicksilver preferences
- In Preferences: Enable Advanced Options
- In Plugins: Install “User Interface Access+” module
- In Catalog>Quicksilver: Check Proxy Objects
- In your Mac System Preferences > Universal Access: Check “Enable
access for assistive devices”
- Open Quicksilver and type “Current Application” + Tab + “Menu bar
items”. If the corresponding commands show up, you are set up.
Hit tab again and type a command to issue your first proxy
command.
- The final step eliminates the need to have to type the last two
commands every time by creating a trigger.
In Triggers > Custom: Create a new trigger for this sequence (it
should have the last action prepopulated when you create a new
one) and create a hotkey for the trigger (I use option+space).

* Bonus tip: Bookmark Training
- First, I recommend bookmarking all the sites you go to most
often. If you’re like me, you probably never bothered to
bookmark google.com, and other sites that you go to so often you
don’t even bother to bookmark. Having these in the system makes
it much more powerful.
- Go through the sites you visit the most and try calling them up
by starting to type their names in Quicksilver. A lot of them
probably won’t be the first result. You need to train them to be
the first result by selecting them one or two times.
- After doing this, you’ll be able to pull up any page instantly.
You’ll never want to even click to open your browser.
- *Note: You’ll want to rescan your catalog whenever you add a new
bookmark by hitting cmd+R to make sure it shows up.

* Super bonus tip: File/Text grabbing
- Now you can select a file or text and literally grab it right
into Quicksilver. Uses include picking a file and sending to
someone, selecting a URL and opening it, selecting a phrase and
sending it to a Google Search.
- In Preferences > Extras: Check “Pull selection from front
application instead of Finder
- Select some text or a file
- Open Quicksilver and hit cmd+G and the selection should show up
in Quicksilver
- *Note- it seems like it won’t grab text from some non-cocoa apps
like Firefox

If you don’t know what Quicksilver is, go to the Quicksilver homepage to download and see this excellent introduction at Lifehacker.

So you’ve started dabbling around with Quicksilver, launching applications and opening files. You know it’s supposed to be able to do so much more, but you’re not sure how to get to all that cool stuff. Unfortunately, a lot of that cool stuff is dead simple to use, it’s just that Quicksilver doesn’t come with a lot of the cool stuff configured. It’s not helped by the fact that there’s a lot of posts with great usage tips and tricks but they usually fail to explain all the setup and correct preferences to get the features actually working.

So here I will outline the 10 applications of Quicksilver than I think are the most useful. These 10 probably account for 90% of what I do with Quicksilver. The focus will be on actual set up instructions rather than details about what the feature does or how to use the feature.

The first two items are super basic, just including them to be comprehensive:

1) Application Launcher- the most basic Quicksilver task
- Type the name of any application and hit enter

2) File finder- another super basic task
- Unless you keep all your files in the standard Mac folders,
you’ll probably want to go to Catalog > Custom and hit the +
button and add other folders to make sure they show up in the
search results.
- For newly added files, you’ll need to rescan your catalog by hitting
cmd+R before you search. This is because Quicksilver caches the
index of your drive. That makes it faster than Spotlight, but
sometimes misses files you just added.
- I recommend Quicksilver over Spotlight for file searching. It’s
faster, it learns what you pick as your first choice on files you
grab a lot, and you can perform a multitude of actions on the file
(rather than just open).

Now here’s the juicy stuff:

3) Google Search (and many other search products)
- In Plugins: Install the Web Search Module
- In Catalog > Modules: Check Web Searches
- Open Quicksilver and type “Google Search” and tab over to enter
your search query

4) Bookmarks
- For Firefox
- In Plugins: Install Firefox Module
- In Catalog: Make sure Firefox is checked
- For del.icio.us
- In Plugins: Install the Social Bookmarks module
- In Catalog: Add a new Social Bookmarks item from the “+” menu
in the bottom
- Hit the info button after adding the item and enter your
login info

5) iTunes control
- In Plugins: Install the iTunes module
- In Triggers > iTunes: Check Next, Previous, Pause/Play, and
Search iTunes
- Then click on the button icon for each and add a hotkey. I use:
- opt + cmd + left/right for Next/Previous
- opt + cmd + down for Pause/Play
- opt + cmd + up for Search

So this is a bit late, partly due to being away at a conference and other stuff. But just wanted to make the official announcement that my company’s site, RevolutionHealth.com has had its official version 1.0 launch a few weeks ago.

There’s been quite a design overhaul from our preview site that launched in January. Most of the effort went into cleaning up the navigation and visual design. Check it out and let me know what you think!

I got back from CHI2007 a couple days ago and I must say it was a blast! It was my second conference and my 3D Dental Records project from senior year got in as a poster presentation.

CHI was held in San Jose, CA, the heart of Silicon Valley. Yes, I got to visit the Googleplex (got a 1-on-1 tour from the best tour guide ever), got to eat lunch there, and sit on their heated toilets (I didn’t have the nerve to turn on the auto wash/dry feature). Their party was off the hook! I also got to visit Yahoo, Nokia, IBM, and Stanford through complimentary tours the day after the trip.

I went about this conference much differently from last year’s CHI. Last year I pretty much stayed with a few people I knew well and quietly went from session to session. I got a decent amount of value, but somewhere in the year between I realized the really important learning and value from a conference goes on in the hallways and lunch tables that fill the gaps between talks. I had the honor of meeting some really great people and forging new relationships.

I discovered SIG’s at this conference, Special Interest Groups. These are sessions where you sit in smaller circles and discuss a topic with people really passionate on the subject. There’s no better place to meet people with similar interests and get fully engaged in a topic rather than passively watching a speaker.

CHI2008 is taking place in Florence next year. That should be really exciting. However, I’m also considering trying a new conference that has more of a design and industry focus since that is more applicable to what I do. CHI is very heavy on methods and research. I’ve heard good things about SXSW. I’m also interested in checking out BJ Fogg’s Persuasive Technology conference as well as Usability Week. So many choices…