What a week.

1) SXSW Interactive - I really wanted to go, but wasn't able. Nonetheless, my entry in the SXSW Web Awards actually won! Amazon Light 4 won the Technical Achievement award for 2004. (Woohoo!)

2) I hate airplanes. I have permanent dents in my knees from seat backs now. After flying MA-FL-MA-CA-MA in the span of 7 days, I am quite sick of airplanes.

3) Etech! Great conference - really gets the gears turning. Some panels are amazing, some a bit tedious, lots in-between, hallway conversations are the best - perfect recipe to get your internal gears churning.

  a) My Tutorial at Etech went pretty well. The subject was Webservices Mashup, and reactions afterward ranged from "Meh - I've seen most of this before" to "Wow, that was really great". So I guess I hit some random sweet spot between not-too-technical and overly-technical. Always hard to gauge. Here's a link to the presentation online, (or as zip file).

  b) Part of my presentation that took the least amount of effort has become one of the more popular bits - the Webservices Mashup Resource List. I plan to maintain and grow that list over time.

  c) Conference Advice: Do not catch a cold right before a presentation you are going to give at a big conference. Having a cold will make you miserable, make your voice disappear, and make you so sleepy you'll miss much of the fun. Trust me on this one.

  d) Conference Advice: Force yourself to be social, even if it's not a natural instinct. You will have awkward moments, but they will be more than balanced out by the good ones.

  e) Some people I'm glad that I met (or caught up with): Erik Benson, Cal (Carl) Henderson, Andy Baio (waxy.org), Jeff Bezos (he actually remembers me), Susan Mernit, Brendan Eich (of Javascript, Mozilla, and Netscape fame), Ben Metcalfe (from the BBC - many nice folks from the Beeb in attendance), Wade Roush (writer for MIT Tech Review), Jeff Few and Andrej Gregov from Amazon, and a bunch more (my poor brain).

  f) Gedankengang (roughly 'thought-flow') from etech: Tagging - not as basic as you may think, there are multiple methods of tagging (group, external, personal), and multiple meanings (for me, for all, for others, for categorization) || SOAP - has its place (vs. REST) - I'm now convinced, thanks Nelson Minar. || HTTP and character-encoding are horrendously broken, but everything still works (for US-English at least), thanks Sam Ruby. || Mozilla folks are really wonderful folks. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool IE fan, but damn, Mozilla's software, performance and crew are winning me over. || A9 does indeed have plans, and is executing them (Opensearch). || It's fun to swap info from device-to-device by touching them (overheard someone call it a 'business kiss'). Thanks Chris Heathcoate and Matt Jones. || "Fast and Sloppy" as a methodology to get people involved and excited about creating things really works well across the board. Low barriers to entry, openness of source and technique, no "hidden magic", etc. From web development to web services to physical and electrical engineerirng. Thanks Neil Gershenfeld. || DRM : Old and Busted (by definition). Thanks again Cory Doctorow. || Wikipedia is still amazing.

Whew - lots of input and output. Now my neck is sore, my family and cat are happy to have me home, I need to recover from this damn cold, and let all of this info seep into my brain some more.

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