Oh, Austin I wish I knew how to quit you...

I have two things I haven't had since I got to Austin: thirty free minutes and a stable internet connection.

Apparently all the Twittering and blogging and streaming video and bandwidth-hogging internet junky behavior has not only the Austin Convention Center's amped-up SXSW wireless overloaded, but all the local hotels, cafes, and T-mobile hot spots. Half the time I can't get online at all, not even with the hotel's ethernet connection, and the rest of the time I can't stay online for more than ten seconds before the connection drops.

Now, you're saying, well, Christie, hey, take this as an opportunity to stop and smell the roses! But number one, I'm an addict, number two, I'm working, so I kind of need to get online and blog at Pet Connection and club.kingsnake and PetHobbyist (you know, the people paying me to be here?), and three, I had to file my SFGate.com column yesterday and not only did I need to submit it via email, I needed to do a little research on the web and apparently to get on the web, one needs an internet connection.

This year, SXSW has taken a stand on making the conference "greener," and included tips on how to reduce the environmental impact of the conference and festival. And then they gave us three bulging bags full of useless crap, nearly all of which is filling and overflowing the trash cans of the hotel, convention center, and streets of Austin. I'm sure some of it ended up in recycling bins, but what a waste.

In addition to our panel on pet blogging, which I'll write about over on Pet Connection, I attended a panel on gossip sites. Since I write for AfterElton.com/AfterEllen.com and have been known once or twice to indulge in a bit of celebrity gossip over there, I thought I might learn something. The panelists included a guy from TMZ, the founder of Twitter, and a New York Times reporter, as well as a blogger from Valleywag.com, a site that covers Silicon Valley gossip for the six people outside of the tech industry who give a damn about it.

There was a woman in the audience who booed the Valleywag panelist, and pouted and flounced around about how persecuted she was, and tossed her hair and acted victimized. So of course, she gets invited to sit with the panelists and proceeded to dominate the panel by whining about how gossip sites have no right to cover the private lives of nobodies like her.... but she, my dears, works for Star Magazine (yeah, the tabloid gossip rag) covering Britney and Paris and their ilk. Why is that different from someone blogging that they saw her (who I've never heard of) having dinner with some tech star (who I've never heard of)?

Her rationale? Because Britney et al have staffs of handlers and publicists to deal with all that attention, and "ordinary people" like her and whoever it is she was dating don't.

I didn't come to the panel to see her. I have no idea who she is, she was acting victimized and like an attention seeker, two behaviors I loathe, and then she objected to someone who characterized what she did as "crashing the panel." But that's exactly what she did. I was bored and aggravated, and probably should have left, but I really couldn't believe the moderator would allow her to stay up there the whole time and dominate the panel the way she did.

It's also funny being here as a "pet blogger," which in case you're wondering gets you zero respect among the uber-cool SXSW crowd, even though virtually all of them have pets and will happily talk to you about them for hours in the hallways. It's very amusing. Especially when a story I blogged on Pet Connection got picked up in USA Today this morning:

The outbreak of contamination in pet foods that killed hundreds and perhaps thousands of cats and dogs last year in the USA wasn't the first such incident, veterinary pathologists have determined.

An outbreak in 2004 that also involved pet foods contaminated with industrial chemicals sickened more than 6,000 dogs and a smaller number of cats across Asia.

Kidney failure in the animals was linked to Pedigree dog foods and Whiskas cat foods manufactured in Thailand by Mars Inc. Thousands of pets died, according to Asian media reports at the time.

The Asian outbreak was little-known in the USA until it was reported last week by the blog Pet Connection. In the American public's view, the U.S. outbreak several years later appeared to be the first of its kind.

[....]

The Georgia paper was published last fall in the Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation but largely went unnoticed until it was picked up by the blog.

Story by Elizabeth Weise and Julie Schmit here.

In other news: The true highlight of my journalistic career, at least after interviewing Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor, was  my coverage of Project Runway over on AfterElton.com. Yes, it's true, I got to interview winner Christian Siriano (who was happy, funny, and adorable) and runner-up Rami Kashou, who was charming, thoughtful, and much warmer than he seemed onscreen. I also gossiped about both of them in the interviews. Mea culpa.

Today I'll be liveblogging (if, that is, I can get online) Moby's keynote address at SXSW over on club.kingsnake.com. Tomorrow is music doc day: I start with Daniel Lanois' new film at noon, then the Joy Division documentary at 1:30, followed by "Lou Reed's Berlin" at 4 PM. I'll be catching The Nightwatchman (Tom Morello's political/folk persona), and then being torn between seeing REM at Stubb's or Martha Wainwright at Club deVille.

Thursday morning, I'll liveblog Lou Reed's keynote address, also on club.kingsnake.com, before seeing Billy Bragg on the day stage at the convention center, and then heading over to the premiere of the film "Body of War." Bragg, Morello, and other artists from the film's soundtrack will be doing a showcase at 7 PM, and Clint and I will be covering that for club.kingsnake.com, too.

If REM won the tossup on Wednesday night, I'll try to catch Martha Wainwright Thursday at 11 PM, but since I'm leaving Friday morning at 7, I suspect I'll be packing and sleeping instead.

Despite how exciting that all sounds, I think I'm a little old to keep up this pace. What can I say?

And oh yeah, I miss having an internet connection and I miss my dogs.

Comments

[margaret]

We live in South Austin and our house has wireless AND dogs. If you're in the neighborhood (or even if you're not), feel free to come over.

[KT]

I was going to make clever comments and engage you in discussion -- but really ... you are too busy and will soon be too tired ;) Talk to you when you are back