Archives

Naming Names

SXSWIn my posts from South by Southwest, I’ve been very self-conscious about dropping names — as in, I’ve tried to avoid it — mostly because I was quite humbled by lots of the people I got to meet and don’t want to seem as if I’m trying to capitalize on the recognition value of their names. All the same, I want to capture some of these names and notes down for the sake of posterity, and also perhaps as an incentive for anyone who didn’t go to this year’s festival; it’s absolutely true that it’s a great place to meet lots of the most interesting people on the Web.

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That’s It

My brain was a little bit friend all morning in this, my last day at South by Southwest. I’m not sure I was optimally receiving all the information in today’s panels, but I count it a successfully day in that I got to have lunch with a small coterie of whip-smart people I’ve long admired, and I got to meet even more great people face-to-face for the first time. (I’m so fucking positive!)

Right now, sitting at the airport, I’m tired and I need some rest before taking on all the work waiting for me at the office tomorrow. So in spite of the fact that I’m missing out on some good panels this afternoon and tomorrow, I’m happy to be on my way home. Everyone I met at the conference was great, but I can’t wait to see my girlfriend and my dog. They’re hard to beat.

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Day Three at SXSW

It’s day three at South by Southwest, and by yesterday at midday, I was already a little weary from all the panels and seminars. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t see some good stuff, because I did. It’s just that there’s only so much sitting still in an overly air-conditioned room for hour after hour that I can do. At lunchtime yesterday, we took off for Threadgills for some down home country cooking, and that helped. The more I see of Austin, the more I like. If it were as walkable a city as New York, I’d almost consider it a place I could feasibly move to one day, maybe.

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LGA to HOU to AUS

American AirlinesAck, American Airlines! To get to Austin, they had me on a connecting flight through Houston. But on my way there from New York, the captain let us know that the connection had been canceled for reasons unknown — or never revealed. (On top of that, they tried to charge me US$3 for a “snack box”!) When we landed, passengers heading on to Austin — and there were lots of us SXSW-types — were handed taxi vouchers and instructed to hail cabs to our final destination. So after flying for four hours, I just spent another three on the road, trawling the lonely midnight highways of Texas. As it happened, my cab driver was gregarious and entertaining, and we had a nice little chat until I laid myself down and caught some sleep. I’m just into Austin now, and my first impressions are that, damn, this is a college town. It’s not as bustling as Manhattan, but there are a surprising number of young kids dressed in their best Gap gear, wandering the streets a little drunk and enjoying themselves. Not me, I’m beat.

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Gate Crashers

On my way to South by Southwest right now, and I’m noticing some things not to do at the airport gate if you don’t want to look like a complete dork: Don’t listen to music on your iPod while conspicuously displaying your white ear buds for all to see. Don’t pull out your shiny Apple PowerBook and start working as if you were putting together a plan for a corporate merger when really all you’re doing is just writing emails to your friends or, worse, writing a weblog post. And, above all else, do not whip out your teeny tiny mobile phone and engage in a conversation with a business associate about something really important sounding — and if you do, don’t ask the other person on the line to, “call me back and leave a message on my voice mail so I remember?” Basically, try not to do anything I do or look like me — just another thirtysomething gadgeteer with an iPod, a laptop and a mobile phone. At least not until you get to Austin, when you’ll probably blend right in.

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Fine-Tuning iTunes

iTunes RatingsIt was about 11:00p the other night when I sat down in front of my computer, ostensibly to add a few new songs to my iTunes database so that I could load them onto my iPod photo. While I was at it, I decided to grab the attendant album cover artwork too, something that I’ve been doing more frequently since buying the iPod photo — these models displays covers nicely if diminutively on their color screens. There’s no rational motivation for wanting the artwork, except perhaps as a small way to compensate for the complete dissolution of visual design as a component of music in the digital age… but I’m not bitter about that.

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Day in Court

I had to appear in criminal court today to answer a summons given to me by a NYPD officer in Central Park back in January. It was early on a Saturday, and I was walking Mister President off-leash, which is permitted before 9:00a. But I had unwittingly wandered into The Rambles, a section of the park that technically qualifies as a nature preserve, meaning dogs are never allowed off-leash there. How I was supposed to know that isn’t particularly clear to me, either.

The judge was kind enough to dismiss the charges contingent on six-months of me “staying out of trouble,” and no fine was levied. In spite of my worries that the process would consume the better part of a day, I was done in about ninety minutes. So all told, I have little to complain about.

But I did notice a few things: First, the whole court house was a dilapidated mess, an embarrassment to the idea of justice, and bore only faint resemblance to any courtroom you’ve seen on television. It was clearly underfunded and overworked, and it was depressing just to be there. And second, when I looked around me at all the other people who, like myself, were waiting to stand trial for relatively minor offenses, almost all of them were males of African American or Hispanic descent. It was a stark illustration of who is targeted most often in criminal proceedings, and in what kind of building society feels like those people deserve to be tried.

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Bad Company

Amid all of my relentless Apple boosterism, I still feel it important to periodically speak out about where the company is wrong and where it behaves maliciously, a self-appointed duty of which I have not been particularly conscientious, admittedly. But, if you’ve got any streak of blue-blooded American fight in you, not to mention a hint of that brand of indignant pride for the primacy of the First Amendment in Our Way of Life, then it’s difficult to ignore this putrid lawsuit that Apple Computer has filed against several online journalists publishing their work on, well, Apple-boosting Web sites.

What transpired was this: before this past January’s Macworld Expo, several highly accurate rumors about then unannounced Apple products appeared at the rumor-based Web site Think Secret. Wasting little time, Apple quickly filed a lawsuit against the publisher of Think Secret and other “unnamed individuals,” ostensibly to smoke out the rumor sources but, in effect, attempting to put a chill on rumor activity in Apple fandom at large. (This particular lawsuit also happens to be just the latest in several similar actions the company has taken to protect its proprietary rights.)

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