I got back from SXSW last night. What an amazing experience. It was awesome meeting so many people. I wish I had had more time to spend with everyone and that I had caught up with a few more people but I am so thankful for the conversations I was able to have. The sessions were great too. It is good to hear other people’s thoughts on topics and I learned some new things and new ideas as well. Not every session was a home run, but there was something to get from each session (and more than a few I want to catch on podcast.)
Hopefully some of the thoughts and ideas that were triggered by SXSW will come out as posts in the next few days, we’ll see how that works, but one thing that struck me the first night I was wandering around was the grackles.
We left our hotel Saturday night to head to the parties and I was struck by this sound – it was so loud and almost mechanical I was wondering who had some mechanical bird sounds playing on the street. No, it wasn’t mechanical it was 100’s of birds in the trees all clicking and whirring and chirping at each other.
When we went back to the hotel we asked and they told us – those are grackles.
My sound recording options were pretty limited, so below is a very poor quality recording (from my blackberry phone voice recorder) but it gives you a little feel for the sound.
Purim has come and gone and the remaining exciting event for the week is the start of SXSW. Last year I was very bummed to miss SXSW and started planning towards making it this year. Reservations are made, plans for the pets are made, and a general (and flexible) plan has been made. I’m not sure of my exact plans but I will be tweeting as I go. I also will be planning a Friday night kiddush/nosh/hang out get together so if you are are going to be at SXSW feel free to stop by. I’ll update with the actual details as to where specifically once I’ve arrived.
I pretty regularly watch the TED videos. Today I watched a talk given by Mike Rowe who does the Dirty Jobs tv show. In it he gives some interesting insight on dirty jobs and questioning if “Pursing your passion” is the right answer. In a sense his talk was the counter-point to the Four Hour Workweek. His thoughts on the balance of the lives of these people with what we might think of as “less than ideal” were quite in line with what I saw when I went to my training class a few weeks ago and shared a class with “Working class” men. I’m not sure what the full lesson is, and I think Mike Rowe is still asking some questions there as well, but his talk is definitely one I recommend, and so I’ve embedded it below.
Are we at war with work? How does tangibility play into the balance of ones life. I think the technical and virtual and passionate parts are relevant, but it is very easy to “over virtualize”. How do you keep your balance in life?
Well I was quite pleased to find out that I could easily import all of my blogposts from blogspot with the comments. There is a little import tab in the administrative interface and it just works.
One of the reasons I was considering the switch over to a self hosted wordpress blog was so that I could actually respond to comments by some means other than just commenting (which as far as I could tell could not be subscribed to so you’d have to check back to see if I replied.)
Another reason was to try and come up with a way to sort my content a bit more by topic/category and allow users to just follow one thread or another if they prefer. I tend to dabble in a broad range of things and while it’s fine if you want to peek in on all of them I’d love to give people an easy way to follow just stories, just social media, just virtual worlds etc. We’ll see if my wordpress theme configuring skills are up to the task.
Now to fix up categories & tags and get various useful widgets like blogrolls and the like back where they belong.
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