Meg makes some good points about the lacklustre panels at this year’s SxSW. It’s still a must-attend event, but I would like to see it fine-tuned a bit. Shorter panels, different viewpoints, and a lunch break would be my suggestions. (via Wes)

I’m sorry I haven’t updated. Since getting back from Austin, I’ve been snowed under with work, mostly of the unpaid kind. I spent yesterday afternoon moving an old filing cabinet I’ve been storing at a friend’s parents’ place for the past ten years. It was like opening a time capsule. Some of the stuff I found inside:

• Bad poetry I wrote, circa 1983 (sorry, no examples!).
• Several issues of Atari ST User, a British computer magazine for my computer of choice in the late 1980s. These are from 1988!
• Several “important” documents, including my high school diploma and my Certificate of Canadian Citizenship.
• “Compact Disc Yearbook 1989,” a magazine that actually rated CD releases as they came out.
• Newspaper clippings of things I was concerned about. Example: articles about the possibility of nuclear war from 1983. Sample headlines: “No plans to evacuate Metro in nuclear war: Alarm may not even be sounded” and “Half of Canadians would die in nuclear attack, MD says.” It’s hard for younger people to imagine that we grew up thinking that the Russians might bomb us into oblivion.
• A book of poetry and short stories I wrote in 1989 while travelling alone in Europe.

More “treasures” as they are unearthed…

Not-to-be-missed Slashdot thread on the keynote conversation between Bruce Sterling and Cory Doctorow. This was one of the more enjoyable events I attended, but I need the audio posted: I couldn’t take notes fast enough! (via Brent)

I’m home from Austin, safe and sound. More to come as soon as I can process it all. Thanks to everyone I met, I had an amazing time!

From my readings about Wi-Fi, I’ve discovered the pastime called wardriving or netstumbling, which involves driving around with a wireless-equipped laptop looking for unsecured access points. These are being compiled into a database so that users can access unused bandwidth. A related project involves various attempts to set up these free networks voluntarily, offering, as John Markoff says in his article, “the promise of a vastly more powerful collaboration driven by the same forces that originally built the Internet.”