The RSS-o-sphere is fairly humming with postings from bloggers announcing their imminent departure for Austin, Texas. Who am I to buck the trend?
I’ll be catching a flight out of Gatwick on Thursday morning. Andy, Richard and Dunstan will be on the same ‘plane, forming the vanguard of the British invasion.
Once I get there, I’m planing to attend as many panels as is humanly possible without cloning myself, introduce myself to many people I only know virtually and, most importantly of all, enjoy some good ol’ Texas barbecue.
If you’re going to be at South by SouthWest, let me know. I’m hoping that my mobile phone will work over there (here’s my vcard if you want to call me). Fortunately, I hear that Austin is fairly swimming in WiFi so you can also iChat me or Skype me (can we use skype as a verb yet?).
Unfortunately, I won’t be sticking around for the music portion of the festival. It sounds like there are going to be some great bands playing. I downloaded the excellent, if somewhat large, SxSW showcase for my iPod. It integrates really nicely with a schedule that you can drop into the notes folder.
It’s probably the second coolest download for an iPod that I’ve come across. The first would have to be the podcasted commentary by the producer of Battlestar Galactica, designed to be synchronised with the television broadcast (if you haven’t seen it yet, be sure to watch the first episode, streamed in its entirety on the website).
I’ve also got my iPod loaded up with a complete schedule of the interactive portion of South by SouthWest, courtesy of Jeremy Flint.
Speaking of cool things to do with your iPod, remember all the fuss about the iPodDownload programme which could transfer songs from an iPod to a computer directly from iTunes? The Apple lawyers were very quick to knock it on the head and subsequent releases of iTunes disabled the plug-in.
Well, it turns out that you can achieve the exact same results using a clever little AppleScript. Who knew?