At year’s end, it’s time to create new calendar pages for my dance club Websites. If you are a dancer in the San Diego area, here are some events which may be of interest. These listings and many more are available on my two Websites: www.icajunzydeco.com, and www.hustlesd.org. Items are listed in chronological order for your convenience.

1. Christmas/New Year’s Dance at Gardena Elks Lodge — Saturday, Dec. 27, 6 p.m. to midnight. Features Charlie Jene (daughter of Ray Charles) singing R&B 6-7:30 p.m., and Andre Thierry and Zydeco Magic 8 p.m. to midnight. Gardena Elks Lodge, 1735 W. 162nd, Gardena, CA 90247. Admission: $20.

2. “Underground Hustle Dance” at Clay’s Stage — Saturday, Dec. 27, 8 p.m. to midnight. Fred Harshbarger hosts a Post-Christmas Hustle Party, 8 p.m. – Midnight Non-Stop Hustle. Free admission, bring a snack or case of water to share. Clay’s Stage, 1375 Logan Ave., Costa Mesa, CA. Fred will be taking video footage to add to his Website about 10 and 10:30 pm. Info at www.claysstage.com.

3. Hustle & Swing United New Year’s Eve Party at Crowne Plaza Hotel, Irvine — Dec. 31, 6:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. Event includes workshops, holiday buffet, late night treats, two dance floors, jack and jill comps, raffles, some great deejays. $75 admission in advance, $100 at the door (limited to 150 people). Info at www.hustleunited.com.

4. Palm Springs New Year’s Swing Dance Classic — Dec. 31 through Jan. 4 Masquerade New Year’s Ball, multiple ballrooms and dancefloors, workshops dancing all night long every night, nightly shows, cash prize comps, world-class performances, super star deejays. Website: http://www.peoplewhodance.net

5. Hustle Dance Workshop with Archie and Melanie Dawson at Innovations Dance Club — Jan. 3, 6:30 p.m. Archie is president and founder of Hustle San Diego, and competed at the national level with both Debra Hampton and his wife Melanie Roberts-Dawson, also national swing dance champion with her previous partner Robert Cordoba. Archie and Melanie are good dancers, and good at making a dance workshop fun. Workshop is $20 for non-members, and $10 for Innovations annual members. Workshop is 6:30 – 8 p.m., with open dancing from 8 – 11 p.m. at Starlight Dance Studio, 6506-H El Cajon Blvd., San Diego, CA 92115. Info at www.innovationsdance.org. 

6. Curley Taylor & Zydeco Trouble at War Memorial Building, Balboa Park — Sat., Jan. 10 Come hear and dance to a great zydeco artist from Louisiana influenced by all of the great bands from the area. Curley played drums for CC Adcock, Steve Riley, his uncles Lil Buck Senegal and Wayne Blue Burns, and C J Chenier. He has since taken up the accordion, formed his own band, and released two hot CDs, Free Your Mind, and Country Boy. Admission for the dance event is $14 (or free if you have never attended a BTSC dance before!). Details at www.icajunzydeco.com. 

7. Jane Hance’s Swing and Country Dance Party — Sat., Jan. 10  Jane will play a great mix of west coast swing, country two-steps, waltz, nightclub two-step and hustle tunes and requests as well. This is her inaugural Swing and Country Dance Party, so don’t miss it! Dance lesson 8-8:30 p.m., and open dancing 8:30 – 10:30 p.m. Admission is $7 ($4 for students). Location is Pattie Wells’ Dancetime Center, 1255 West Morena Blvd. (across from Toys R Us), San Diego, California 92110. Jane’s Webpage is at www.wowpromotions.com/dancelessons.html.

8. D.J. Ron’s Hustle Party at Ciao Bella Italian Restaurant, La Mesa — Fri., Jan. 24, 9 p.m. – midnight (9-9:30 p.m. Hustle Dance Lesson with David Nguyen / 9:30 – 11 p.m. Open Dancing.)  Ron Cantwell spins mostly hustle with some salsa, west coast swing and tango for good measure. 5263 Baltimore Drive, La Mesa, CA 91942, Phone: (619) 337-0238. Free admission, but please buy beverages or food to support the restaurant. Info at www.hustlesd.org.

9. Hooray for Hollywood Swing and Hustle Dance Event, Los Angeles – Feb. 5-8, 2009. Three day west coast swing-hustle-salsa event takes place at the Hacienda Hotel at LAX. Primary organizers are Debra Hampton and Maer Bardai, so there will be top hustle talent from across the nation, and world champion swing and salsa dancers from the So Cal area. Event features workshops, dinner show, and late night dancing with great deejays. Event info at http://www.hoorayforhollywooddancefestival.com.

10.  BTSC Presents Kevin Naquin and The Ossun Playboys at War Memorial Building, Balboa Park — February 7, 7-10:30 p.m.  Kevin Naquin’s band hails from sosuthwest Louisiana, and his music is steeped in the traditional Cajun influence, though he pushes the limits with a bit of experimentation and a lively tempo guaranteed to keep you moving on the dance floor. The band has six CDs out, and the latest is “Call It What You Want.” This will be Kevin Naquin’s first performance in San Diego (his last visit was cancelled by Hurricane Gustav which closed down airports and other transportation corridors out of Louisiana.) Admission for the dance event is $14 (or FREE if you have never attended a BTSC dance before!). Details at www.icajunzydeco.com.

Okay, I lied. There are 11 top dance opportunities:

11. Keith Gussoni Hustle Workshops at/near Dance North County — Weekend of Feb. 14  World champion Keith Gussoni and his wife Celeste teach dance in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, teach and compete in major dance events. His workshops are entertaining and challenging. Be prepared to learn something about dancing with attitude! More info will be posted at www.hustlesd.org as available.

Enjoy, and see you on the dance floor.   Jim

Earlier this week, the humble computer mouse celebrated its 40th birthday. While surprisingly little has changed since Doug Engelbart, an engineer at Stanford Research Institute, in Palo Alto, CA, first demonstrated the mouse to a skeptical crowd in San Francisco, we may have already seen a few glimpses of the future of computer interfaces. If so, over the next few years, the future of the computer interface will likely revolve around touch.

Thanks to the popularity of the iPhone, the touch screen has gained recognition as a practical interface for computers. In the coming years, we may see increasingly useful variations on the same theme. A couple of projects, in particular, point the way toward interacting more easily with miniature touch screens, as well as with displays the size of walls.

One problem with devices like the iPhone is that users’ fingers tend to cover up important information on the screen. Yet making touch screens much larger would make a device too bulky to slip discreetly into a pocket.

A project called nanoTouch, developed at Microsoft Research, tackles the challenges of adding touch sensitivity to ever-shrinking displays. Patrick Baudisch and his colleagues have added touch interaction to the back of devices that range in size from an iPod nano to a watch or a pendant. The researchers’ concept is for a gadget to have a front that is entirely a display, a back that is entirely touch sensitive, and a side that features buttons.

To make the back of a gadget touch sensitive, the researchers added a capacitive surface, similar to those used on laptop touch pads. In one demonstration, the team shows that the interface can be used to play a first-person video game on a screen the size of a credit card. In another demo, the device produces a semitransparent image of a finger as if the device were completely see-through.

When a transparent finger or a cursor is shown onscreen, people can still operate the device reliably, says Baudisch, who is a part-time researcher at Microsoft Research and a professor of computer science and human-computer interaction at the Hasso Plattner Institute at Postdam University, in Germany.

Details of the device will be presented at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Boston next April. The researchers tested four sizes of square displays, measuring 2.4 inches, 1.2 inches, 0.6 inches, and 0.3 inches wide. They found that people could complete tasks at roughly the same speed using even the smallest display, and that they made about the same number of errors using all sizes of the device. Furthermore, the back-of-the-screen prototypes performed better than the smallest front-touch device.

Baudisch is encouraged by the results and is in the process of establishing guidelines for building rear-touch interfaces into tiny devices. “Envision the future where you buy a video game that’s the size of a quarter . . . and you wear electronic pendants,” he says.

Jeff Han, founder of a startup called Perceptive Pixel, based in New York, says that Baudisch’s concepts are impressive, but he’s more interested in using touch technology on large displays. He has already had some success: he has supplied wall-size touch screens to a number of U.S. government agencies and several news outlets. In fact, his company’s touch screens were used by news anchors during the November presidential election to show viewers electoral progress across the country.

Traditionally, large touch screens have been built in the same way as smaller ones, making them very expensive to create. Han’s displays take advantage of a physical phenomenon called total internal reflection: light is shone into an acrylic panel, which acts as the display and is completely contained within the material. When a finger or another object comes in contact with the surface, light scatters out and is detected by cameras positioned just behind the display. Because a thin layer of material covers the acrylic, the scattered light also depends on the amount of pressure that is applied to the display.

In a paper presented in October at the User Interface Software and Technology Symposium, in Monterey, CA, Han’s colleague Philip Davidson describes software that takes touch beyond the surface, using pressure to add another dimension to a screen.

Davidson created software that recognizes how hard a person is pressing a surface. If a user presses hard enough on an image of, say, a playing card and slides it along the display to another card, it will slide underneath. Additionally, if a person presses hard on one corner of an object on the screen, the opposite corner pops up, enabling the user to slide things underneath it. This provides a way to prevent displays from getting too cluttered, Davidson says.

However, Davidson also notes that pressure sensitivity should not make the device uncomfortable to use, and he has studied the natural fatigue that a person feels when she presses on a display and drags an object from one side to the other. The new pressure-sensitive features are expected to ship by the middle of next year, Davidson says.

I like a lot of different kinds of music, and I’ve heard a lot of artists perform in different venues. When I think back on all of the concerts I’ve heard, there are two which stand apart in my memory. These were concerts where my head was filled days later with the music I had heard, and I relived an excitement for the performance over and over again. Everything about the evening was perfect. The music, the audience, the excitement of experiencing great music being produced. Both happened to be jazz performances. The first was in 1974 at the Catamaran Hotel, and the band featured Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet. Near the end of the evening the event promoter, Joe Morillo, joined Dizzy on stage playing sax. I thought this must be the best anyone can play jazz.

I had a similar experience on July 25, 2007 at Anthology in San Diego. Mose Allison was in concert, and it just happened that my wife, Jane, and her mother, Vera, were driving into San Diego from Arizona. Mose Allison is Vera’s all-time favorite artist, and if they drove right through to downtown, I could buy a ticket for Vera and leave it in will call so we could watch from the upstairs balcony. As luck would have it, I walked in with Dave Conover of Conover Design, who already had a dinner table reserved, and we were welcomed to join him. We could both, as it turned out, watch the entire performance from the floor. Vera and I are both fans, and had memorized his lyrics having listened to his CDs and vinyl records for years. (Vera has distances of her vacation trips measured in how many Mose Allison CDs it takes to get there.) The setting at Anthology was perfect, as was the sound and acoustics. Anthology features closed-circuit TV cameras to catch the show from different angles, and huge displays above the performers. The music put me in a reverie, or maybe that was the wine. The performance seemed flawless, though Mose’s voice seemed frail, delicate, but his lyrics and commentary wry and cutting. Everything one might expect from an aging master of his craft, jazzy blues. Again, after the performance, my head was buzzing for a couple of days afterward. I could not forget the experience of hearing and seeing one of my very favorites artists. I commemorated the date by getting a coffee mug printed by Debbie Wright of Designer Keepsakes, and presented it to Vera. She was delighted, because it was probably her favorite concert ever as well. And we are forever indebted to Dave Conover for making it extra special.

I have a lot of Mose Allison on my iPod, but one album I particularly enjoy is “The Earth Wants You,” an rueful ode to getting older. His music on this collection marks where he comes from (as with “Variation on Dixie”), and where he is going (“The Earth Wants You”), and how he feels about it (“Natural Born Malcontent”), with an undying cynicism about the current state of affairs (“who’s hot, who’s cold, who’s turning garbage into gold”); and with surprisingly hopeful prescience of current events (“Just ’cause your ma was pearly white, your pa was chocolate brown. With time comes understanding, this world is turnin’ around.”) Maybe Mose is getting on in age, but nothing in his music gets old for me. If you give this one a try, you may become a fan of Mose Allison as well.

Professional networking sites function as online meeting places for business and industry professionals, and serves as a business-to-business marketplace. The traditional way to interact is face-to-face. Social networking Websites make it possible for people to network with their peers from anywhere, at anytime in an online environment.

With hundreds of professional networking sites on the Web, which Websites and which features are going to be beneficial to promoting a small business (or a large one)? I asked Rick Itzkowich, co-founder of Productive Learning & Leisure, and blogger on social networking for newbies, what sites he thought are best for business relationship development, and what features are particularly valuable.

LinkedIn claims to have more than 20 million registered users from 150 different industries. This is a good way to connect to professionals in a specific field. Rick recommends the LinkedIn Q&A section as a great way to get exposure, and you can get a lot of credibility by having people recommend you. But Rick says LinkedIn is not a particularly good marketing site for the small business owner or independent professional.

Facebook, perhaps the best known social networking site in North America, seems like a good way to stay in contact with family and friends throughout the day, and does allow me to feed my blog to my “wall.” Rick says he finds their interface too complicated. There are many features to Facebook which are not readily accessible through the navigation.  

Biznik.com bills itself as “business networking that doesn’t suck.” Biznik offers free accounts, with many features turned off or limited without upgrading to a $10-$24 per month subscription. Biznik promotes articles written by members to be posted and rated by readers. This system gives members excellent feedback on whether people are reading your articles, and what they think about them with “comments.” My profile page shows photos of people in my network, my recent activity in the network, and three articles I posted with a readers’ rating of each. For monthly subscription you can feed your latest blog stories, have a video profile, find out who visited your profile page, and make contact with them. According to Rick, who is subscribed at the $10 a month level, Biznik is “a great way to gain visibility through articles. I also find the folks there to be cooperative. It is a great site, especially in Seattle where they have about 8,000 members, and they get a lot of live events.”

Plaxo.com calls itself a “different kind of address book, one that leverages the power of the network effect to stay up-to-date.”  According to Rick, “I only use Plaxo as a way to keep track of people’s birthdays. Their system makes it incredibly easy (and economical) to send people an e-card for their birthday. There are other uses for it, but I only use it for this.” Call me paranoid, but I don’t put my correct birthdate on any of these sites. 

Ecademy.com is really big in Europe, and will instantly get your email inbox filled with people wanting to add you to their network unless this feature is turned off. Advertise your business, find businesses, post and respond to blogs, run your own business networking events, automatic search engine submission on Google. According to Rick, “If you’re interested in networking internationally, it’s the best site.”

And Rick says Naymz.com is “a great site to build your credibility and reputation. It is great for SEO. They also have a feature that if you reach a certain reputation level, they pay for a sponsored link in Google. You can type my name, Rick Itzkowich, into Google and you will see the sponsored link on the right. This is free for me.”

Those are six business networking sites, and I have a profile on each of them. Here are some entertaining and informative resources for getting into business networking on the Web:

Laura Bergells 
“Birds and the Bees: 4 Truths about Social Media Networking”

Common Craft
Social Media in Plain English

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIOClX1jPE

Rick Itzkowich
Social Networking for Newbies (Blog)

http://www.snfornewbies.com

Debra Simpson (North San Diego Business)
Magic in Words / Magic in Blogging (Blogtalkradio, Tutorials and Consulting)

http://www.magicinwords.com/

Paul Chaney (Realtor)
Social Media: What You Need to Know for Today’s Market

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DDbRnzMg-g

Josh Bernoff
How To Be a Social Media Change Agent

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB9Npo3qtH0

Poetic Prophet Chuck of Mo Serious TV
Social Media Addition Rap

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwAjur3_08Y