Bits & Atoms - SXSW startin' up

It's hard to believe that a year has past since the last SXSW, but it has. Free breakfast tacos this morning were a nice welcome. Mmmmmmm!

There seems to be plenty of coffee carts around and later today the organizers are providing free drinks at the same temporary park facility where the tacos were plenty this morning. Mmmmm.

Weather's great, coffee's plentiful, bandwidth's adequate. Picked up my SXSW bag of goodies and purged the worthless stuff so I'm ready for the 2:00 p.m. keynote.

The first panel was perfect. Alexander Manu (Ontario College of Art & Design) presented a wonderful powerpoint The Imagination Challenge, explaining how we lost our "play" in everyday work.

Any presenter that starts out the powerpoint with a photo of his son playing with his balls (tasteful and in context) is going to get your attention and start a conference with a bang. Mr. Manu played one of his own inventions, a voice scratch player on his Palm Treo 600. This basically setting down the thought we should learn how to play more. We've lost that and need to regain it.



SXSW blurb | TT1 - Axis International

Key points of the presentation.

• DJ Crush - we should listen to
• Heart Attack - TV show we should watch
• Tiger Woods - $52 million dollars paid to the golfer to "put the ball in the hole"
• dichotomy between work and play
• play is never a task
• sense of seriousness should be in our play
• corporations should create a "Chief Possibilities Officer"
• Alexander reads Trend Watch
• Lego mission statement - "Add value to plastic". Example - Bionicle line.
• organized exploration of possibility = play
• Alexander ends with "What if your toilet could speak?" and "What if your toothbrush could speak?"
  

I had my SD card primed with music yesterday and somehow blew out the tunes so I'm listening to KUT via the Palm radio. I picked up a SD card reader this morning so I can start grabbing some of that great SXSW music roaming about the net.