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the long dark teatime of tech support aka the bbq hangover

So I was gone to Texas for a week. I had a terrific time. My panel went well, my panelists were wonderful. You can read the notes over on librarian.net. The best part of the whole thing, besides being a small part of what The Atlantic called “The Year of the Librarian” at SXSW, was that my panel was over by 6 pm on Friday meaning I had the rest of the conference to just schmooze and hang out. I am not a natural schmoozer (I know people who know me may disagree, but this is all hard work!) but I managed to have a terrific time meeting people, scooting all over the place, eating a lot of BBQ, taking the last bus home, staying at friends’ places and spending a lot of time saying “We should do this more often. And inviting people to Vermont, sincere invitations that will mostly never be taken up on. So some meetups

  • The Old Timers Ball, a place to hang out with people you hung out with at SXSW 2000.
  • The MetaFilter meetup, a well-attended get together of internet people
  • Lunch with a friend of the family I randomly ran into in an elevator
  • Lunch with a good friend from San Francisco who I don’t see nearly enough
  • Dinner with my co-workers from MeFi (and Andy) where we ordered one of everything from the dessert menu (N=6, we’re not that crazy)
  • Dinner with folks I’d never met who are friends from a mailing list
  • A party containing many of the people from the other meetups
  • A old-timers dinner for some of the same people from the first night
  • An open mike night where people told stories.
  • Panels that both my co-workers gave [Josh did Worst Websites Ever and Matt talked about community moderation.]

And I had some other food. And then I came home and everything was broken.

Actually I lucked out with travel as I tend to. So I got home Thursday [after an overnight at Jim’s] and fled Boston in true Evacuation Day spirit the next day. The DSL that was supposed to be installed was not installed (all my internet comes from my tethered iphone this week). The page proofs for my book that were supposed to have fixed the errors in the first proofs were not fixed. My blog was down with mystery failures. I was tired, cranky, full of digesting BBQ, cold. However, I was amped with a week full of nerd hugs and sharp people and their crazy ideas and I dug in to these projects like a marathon runner. Now, by the end of the first full day, things are mostly calm. My edits are back with the publisher. My blog is back up for now. The DSL folks swore on Twitter they’d look into this. And Jim’s on his way up to visit and I have dinner from the culinary arts kids in the fridge waiting to be warmed up when he texts me that he’s hit the Vermont border. It’s melty and muddy here. And I’m taking the weekend off.

What do you think?

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