The Jeff Beckham Weblog

There’s a nice interactive feature on Statesman.com that lets you search the Austin Police Department’s records for any property crime reported in 2006. What’s more, there’s a slick Google Maps interface that allows you to zoom in on the location and get more details, including whether the report led to an arrest.
You can search the [...]

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There’s a great commercial for EA Sports NCAA 08 college football game featuring a UT fan by the name of Lee Jennings. But Burnt Orange Nation has discovered that “Lee” is actually aspiring actor Toby Meuli, a Baylor grad now living in Los Angeles.
The commercial lists Jennings’ online player handle as Longhorn36. So am I [...]

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Texas Monthly’s Brian Sweany offered readers of the magazine’s Delay of Game blog the chance to ask Mike Leach a question as part of his interview with the Red Raiders coach. I took him up on his offer and the interview was published today:
tm.com: I have a question from a reader named Jeff who asks [...]

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A year ago, the Alamo Drafthouse website was stuck in the 1990s, far behind the innovative approach to moviegoing that the actual Alamo experience brings. But Tim League and crew have kicked it in gear over the past 12 months, with a new design, a blog, and added functionality.
The Alamo folks just added another useful [...]

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This week is the deadline for submitting initial ideas for presentations at South by Southwest. After this week, the list will be posted to the Panel Picker for voting. Here are the three panels I submitted this year:

Choosing the right metrics when making design decisions: Some companies don’t make a move without looking at the [...]

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For the past seven years, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey posted more than a thousand entries under the pseudonym “rahodeb” on a Yahoo Finance bulletin board, praising his own company and bashing competitors like Wild Oats.
Those postings came to light this week as part of the FTC lawsuit to block Whole Foods’ takeover of Wild [...]

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Over at Read/Write Web, Josh Catone compares the recent redesigned sites for CNN, USA Today, and AOL News.
He gives the design edge to CNN, and the social-media advantage to USA Today (whose features are powered by Austin’s Pluck).

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The organizers of Maker Faire have chosen Austin as the first stop outside of the San Francisco Bay Area for their collection of do-it-yourself science, art, craft, and engineering projects.
Maker Faire is put on by the staff of Make and Craft magazines, which aim to inspire people to dig deep into DIY projects and to [...]

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PaidContent.org highlights a great blog entry from Houston Chronicle sportswriter John McClain that highlights the insanity of a new NFL policy on use of online video at news organization websites. Essentially, no video clip on a news site may be longer than 45 seconds per day.
McClain and Anna-Megan Raley send up the policy to great [...]

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While many folks spent the weekend playing with their iPhone, an Austin company spent those days taking one apart.
Austin-based Portelligent is a “teardown firm”: they take the latest consumer electronics and (yikes!) disassemble them, looking for the details of construction, component suppliers, and cost data to inform companies about what their competitors are putting into [...]

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