SXSW Day 5

Tuesday May 11:

A summary of yesterday's activity (Tues, Day 5). The crowd was perceptibly changing on Tuesday in the convention center, with an increase in registrants with wild hair, tattoos, and piercings mixed in among the film and technology geeks. And a lot more people wearing black and walking around with guitar cases.

I started at a 10am panel on 'going green' in the digital world. But I was trying to do some work email at the same time, so unfortunately I caught maybe only half the content.

At 11:30 I went to the Michael Eisner panel discussion with Mark Cuban as the moderator. Even Cuban made reference to the Zuckerberg keynote ((sic) "I'm not used to being a moderator, but I think I learned a think or two from the Zuckerberg interview about what not to do.") It seems like most panels are opening with a panelist joking about that keynote, including both today so far.

In the 1:00 slot, I went to the Billy Bob Thornton interview. He was engaging and it was well-done, although he kept his dark sunglasses on the whole time. (Meanwhile: Lunch? Granola bars.)

At 2:00 I started at a JavaScript library talk, but it was too full and the code on the screen was too small to read, so it seemed useless. I ducked out and went to the day's keynote with Jane McGonigal from the Institute for the Future. She was great; I'll have to look at her site/blog a bit sometime.

Next I went to the 3:30 panel on Web hosting scalability (i.e. issues with cacheing, tools like squid/memcached, etc), and different experiences for the companies involved on the panel. The panelists included the founder of Digg, the founder of StumbleUpon, a lead architect at Flickr, and a couple others.

At 5pm, in the final panel round, I sat in the back of a discussion on Internet Radio (panelists from Pandora, Rhapsody, etc). I slipped out at 5:30 to meet my wife for an evening SXSW movie, saving time to stop at the Film Awards party on the way. I merely went in, got a free bottle of Fuse (peach/mango), and left. No waiting in beer or food lines.

I walked to the Ritz for a 6:30 movie, "The Upsetter" which was a doc about Lee 'Scratch' Perry. Let's just say it could have been done better; I had a few problems with it. I thought of 4 issues that I would feed back to the filmmakers if I was inclined. But since the movie was at the Ritz, at least we could have dinner; I tried the artichoke heart pizza this time. It was fine but not as good as the chicken pesto pizza. (Or did the weaker movie make me psychologically enjoy my food less?) My wife said she might have left the movie if we hadn't had to wait for our check.

Now I'm getting excited about seeing REM, especially at a place like Stubbs BBQ. Wow.