Day 3: Mellow Hangout Day
I'm lying in bed at the hotel, feeling exhausted and more than a little under the weather. It has been, however, been an excellent day. While I didn't attend as many panels, I did have extended conversations with several people and touched base with others. My personal reason for being at SXSW has shifted from information acquisition to relationship building, which is perhaps what it should have been all along.
I've been noticing that my notes about the SXSW experience have been rather sparse compared to last year's effort. I had first attributed this to my general tiredness, which led to me not choosing to spend 3 hours a night summarizing the day's events. This year I'm just noting my surface impressions, because you can listen to the panels themselves; this year's SXSW Panel Podcasts are already being posted and draw your own conclusions. A second reason for my diminished output didn't occur to me until today. Instead of using my cute OLPC XO laptop, with its green wireless ears and puppy-like aura, I lugged my Macbook Pro 17" to the convention center so I could do my Southwest Airlines check-in early enough to get into the coveted "A boarding group" (Southwest Airlines does not assign seats). The earliest you can do an online check-in is 24 hours before the flight is scheduled to departure. My flight leaves at 240PM tomorrow, so I had to login at 240PM today (24 hours in advance) to get my place in line.
Because I had my MacBook Pro with me, I decided to use it to take notes during Lea Alcantara's The Art of Self-Branding, the first panel of the day that I chose to attend. As I started to type, I drew an immediate conclusion about my 2008 note taking methodology: Moleskines and fountain pens are a zillion times slower. And compared to the XO laptop's adorable-but-tiny rubbery keyboard, my MBP's keyboard is familiar enough that I can type with "good enough" accuracy even with the laptop LCD backlight turned off (I'm a decent, if sloppy, touch typer; I don't have look at the screen when I'm transcribing notes). Oh well...lesson learned.
