And then, this one time at geek camp...

I’m having an absolute ball here at SXSW. By day, I’m filling up my brain with incredibly useful information and ideas. By night, I’m meeting great people and generally having a fun time.

Yesterday’s speaker schedule had a great one-two punch by Eric and Tantek. They were both talking about microformats and XHTML. It really got my creative juices flowing. In fact, when I should have been paying more attention to a panel called "Building your brand with blogs", I was quickly knocking together a little DOM script to create a Met-roll on the fly.

There’s a lot of creative energy flying around and there’s one point that keeps coming across in all the panels, no matter how technical the subject matter, which is: "it’s all about people". At the end of the CSS panel called "How to be beautiful: more hi-fi design with CSS", Doug related a very powerful and touching story that really drove the point home.

I thought I knew what to expect from this conference but I was wrong. It’s exceeding all my expectations.

The only down-side is that Jessica isn’t here. Still, she was able to vicariously share the geekiness via iSight. Everyone waved hello from Austin to Arizona.

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My favourite bit of the archive on this site is the link that says “on this day”. It’s of no interest to anyone except me, but I love going through this little time tunnel.

Using that link this month gives me a flashback to March five years ago when The Situation was unfolding.

I remember the build-up at the end of February. We were in Galway for a birthday weekend getaway. One morning in the hotel I saw the papers were running a story that seemed so Irish to me: because of this emerging virus, people were no longer to give the “sign of peace” at mass (that’s the bit where you awkwardly shake hands with the people around you). I chuckled. Nervously.

Then we were leaving Ireland, in the taxi to the airport in Dublin the radio was on. A medical professional was urging the cancellation of the St. Patrick’s Day parade because a grand total of 2 or 3 people in the country had this virus. The DJ reacted with incredulity. It sounded like a pretty far-fetched idea to me too, because St. Patrick’s Day was just over two weeks away.

The St. Patrick’s Day parade was cancelled.

Throughout The Situation I was keeping track of things in Ireland. It was like seeing an A/B test unfolding. Everything that England was doing wrong, Ireland was doing the opposite. It wasn’t quite New Zealand, but they put scientists front and centre of their decision-making precision. Whereas here, policy was driven by wishful thinking.

I was writing about it all here on my website. I also started recording a tune every day for 200 days. Here’s the first one. See how fresh-faced I am? I decided to stop shaving during lockdown. After six weeks, I looked like this.

But to really recall what that time was like, I recommend reading Jessica’s account of 2020. The first entry is called A Journal of the Plague Week and it was published five years ago. The final entry was A Journal of the Plague Week 52 a year later.

# Sunday, March 23rd, 2025 at 2:05pm

Previously on this day

24 years ago I wrote Booklend: A Lending Library By Post

I like this:

24 years ago I wrote Bush or chimp?

Planet Of The Apes.