Laughing Meme

I’m heading out for a whirlwind tour of points ever so slightly south. I’ll be in San Diego for ETech, arriving Monday March 3rd (gulp, thats tomorrow) and leaving Thursday for Austin for SxSW, where I’ll be through next Tuesday night. (despite promises to myself, this is not the year I do the interactive+music marathon, I’m realistic, I’ve watched co-workers train all year, not an undertaking for amateurs)

ETech

I’m super excited by ETech this year for the first time in recent memory, all the things I want to talk about are on the schedule: large datasets, cheap customizable hardware, social networks, and the environmental, political, and social implications there of.

SxSW

I haven’t even looked at the schedule for Austin yet, but I’m pumped to see both Heather and Simon talk about lessons learned from trying to internationalize a site like Flickr, (Mon 10am, and Tue 5pm respectively) and Paul and George (along with MattB, and SimonW) talk about working on interdisciplinary teams (Tue 3pm). And Andy’s ensemble “Worst Website Ever” stand up routine looks not to be missed.

You

What are you going to see?

Me

I’m also looking forward to:

• having some quiet time this week to work with Rabble and finally release the iCalico source, though it looks like I’m going to first learn git to do it
• making a little progress catching up on a serious backlog of writing.
• seeing friends, especially those who’ve recently been opting out of the grind of Silicon Valley jobs/San Francisco geek party scene.
• continue conversations I’ve been having with folks about privacy and social expectation, large datasets and inference, , open data, and of course OAuth.

Heard muttered in the standing room only crowd after Jason Fried’s keynote, “I’m working on my new keynote, its called ‘Eat When You’re Hungry, Sleep When You’re Tired’”.

HJ: “Do you love the Internet?”
EF: “I love the Internet, but it still has to go home in the morning.”

Aaron Boodman on why web developers don’t care about “making it work in Win/IE.”
“It’s hurt us enough, and we want to hurt it back.”

“Live blogging SxSW is rather besides the point.”

“This is what life should always be like!” (ambiguous in context, either in reference to the wall to wall, don’t stop partying with 3000 of your closest friends, or on the prevalence of dodgeball to organize much of it)

Microphones need visual feedback on whether the speaker is speaking into them. At conferences you’re dealing with amateur speakers, and they seem to have no problem greater then that of speaking into the mike. A little bar, a light that goes on and off, something ambient and subtle.

With everything going on right now I was going to take a pass on Austin this year, even though I’ve been tightly clutching my tickets and counting days since last Fall.

Jasmine however is wonderful, and set me straight, and I’m arriving tomorrow morning, perhaps a little discombobulated, and worse for the wear, but excited. See you there! (now I just need to deal with the fact that I already refunded my plane ticket, and hotel res., and I’m out of clean socks)

All of which brings me to the question, what the hell is up with the 5pm timeslot on Saturday. Who thought it was a good idea to have Kathy Sierra, danah boyd, and Tantek Celik cross scheduled. Bah.

So this year I’m finally going to make it to SxSW (Interactive). I’ve been meaning to go for years, but I’ve always been busy, out of the country, or going to ETech.

So does anyone have advice on where to say, where to go, who to meet up with? Anyone looking for a roomie?