SXSW starts this Thursday, and I’ll be attending. You can catch me speaking on a funny panel called “How not to be a Douchebag at SXSW”, which Ed Huntsinger is hosting. But hey, it won’t be about tech. So maybe you won’t like that.

SXSW Interactive is great, but it’s like work to me; I always have to be on and make connections with people for work. Sometime around next Tuesday, the music portion of the event will start, and it’s a blissful mix of music, people, and madness.

I’ve spent the last couple of days or so going through the torrents for SXSW Music. 646 songs on the first one, and another 309 on the second torrent.

You can grab both of them here if you want to download them. They’re huge, but worth it.

As is the case with most submissions, about 90% of it is crap, but if you’re willing to sit through and listen to the music there’s a wealth of wonderful artists here.

Here’s my top 15 or so, in no particular oder

Allo Darlin- My Heart Is A Drummer

Something like the 60′s, yet reminiscent of Sing-Sing and some of the more country inspired 4AD artists.

ELEW – Mr. Brightside

Eric Lewis, AKA ELEW is a mindblowing pianist, playing what he likes to call Rockjazz on piano, He’s played TED, our own DNA Lounge. This is his cover of Mr. Brightside by the Killers.

The Golden Filter – Hide Me

Blissful, female vocal based, bouncy disco-electro perfect for the dancefloor.

The Heavenly States – Oui Camera Oui

A terrible recording with little to no dynamic range that reminded me of early Julian Cope.

Kill The Noise – All Too Vivid

I’d expect to hear this song at 1015 (a house club here in SF) at about 3:30 in the morning. Incessant, bouncing, house beat with heavily vocoded nothingness on top. Who just bought an access virus? You did, yes you did.

Lights – Saviour

This is what it would sound like if Canada tried to produce the LA Wall-of-sound pop sound. Female Vocals, Big, big bridges and choruses. Expect to hear this on MTV soon. I love this piece of pop aside from the minor Auto Tune glitches that exist all over it. Nice harmonies, but the lyrics? Forget it. It’s pop.

Luder – Sing to Me

I think I picked these guys because I’ve been on a strange metal bent lately (I blame Jack Black and too many late night PS3 sessions of Brutal Legend). Unfortunately this sounds like a goth band trying to complete for vocal bandwidth with slayer. It sort of works.

Maren Parusel – Dear Love

The likeness of Maren’s voice to Feist is what does it for me here. Breathy female vocals on a solid rock background with minimal rhythm guitar. A string quartet pops up unexpectedly to lift the chorus.

Margaret Cho – Eat Shit and Die

Can’t go wrong with Marget Cho.

Minipop – Precious

Minipop is the sort of breathy, reverb laden beauty that attracted me to bands like Love Spirals Downwards and whatever Project Records was vomiting up in the 90′s. The thing here, is that Minipop throws away all of those pretentious for perfect, blissed-out shoe gazer wonderfulness. I saw them at the Independent in SF last year and fell in love with them on the first listen. It helps that the singer is a 5’2″ elf-like creature. Loads of delay, lots of chorus. Love it.

Noush Skaugen – Run Baby Run

Guitars meet keyboards with a driving bass that reminds me of early Jesus and Mary Chain, but there’s far too many drums to really make the comparison hold true. The sort of music you’d want as the wind rips through your hair at 80mph down the highway.

Resplandor – Downfall

A reincarnation of Slowdive. Wall of guitars everywhere. I feel like I’m back in 1992. Excellent stuff.

Ruby Isle – So Damn High (Will Eastman Club Edit)

Big, giant kick drum and vocal samples everywhere. Electro at it’s most base.

Sex with Strangers – New City Anthem

Think first album Shiny Toy Guns with far less production and a bit of Human League thrown in for fun.

Sofia Talvik – Jonestown

Think Suzanne Vega and the Sundays coming together, without all that needless strumming of the 12-string. I won’t go to see her play at SXSW, but I’d listen to it with the lights out.

Web 2.0 Expo 2010, San Francisco, CA
May 3rd-6th
In the Belly of the Whale: Operations at Twitter

Chirp (Twitter’s Official Developer Conference)
San Francisco, CA
April 15th, 2010, 4:30PM (Hack Day)
Scaling Twitter: I’ll be speaking on some of the issues we’ve experienced in scaling twitter and you’ll get to meet members of our Ops team.

Velocity 2010
San Francisco, CA
June 22nd-24th, 2010
Waiting for proposal approval, but probably will be similar to my talk at Chirp

Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle‘s “Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On“.

Read that, perhaps while watching/listening toKevin Kelly‘s riveting talk (from the TED EG conference) on the next 5000 days of the web (that’s right, we’re only 5000 days old) and the future of the Semantic web. Kelly says we’re building not a series of small machines on the Internet, but one gigantic thinking machine, approaching the connectivity level of the human mind.

Details of the talk are available on the Veloctiy 2009 site.

You can Watch the presentation (off of blip.tv) and download a PDF containing all of the slides here.

Update: It looks like blip.tv and O’Reilly moved some links around. Page updated.

First there were social networks, and then there were location-based social networks, and now GPS and navigation-enhanced mobile social networks. This panel will explore how these emerging platforms integrate with existing social networks (facebook, twitter, etc), leverage GPS navigation functionality, and take location-aware social networking to the next level.

It’s at 5pm on Tuesday, the 17th of March.

More details at available on the panel’s schedule page.

Macworld 2009 is this week in my home town of San Francisco, and while we won’t have Jobs’ famous Keynote speech nor the participation of Apple this year, we will have the usual barrage of Macworld Parties.

A great list of events and parties is right here.

My week looks a bit like this:

• Macworld Expo
  Mon, Jan 5 Moscone Center
• Macworld Photowalk
  Mon, Jan 5 – 2:00pm Moscone Center
• MacWorld Monday Tweetup
  Mon, Jan 5 – 6:00pm 21st Amendment
• Macworld Finale Bash
  Tue, Jan 6 – 6:00pm Jillian’s @ Metreon
• San Francisco Tweet Up
  Wed, Jan 7 – 5:00pm House of Shields
• EFF’s 18th Birthday Party with DJ Spooky
  Wed, Jan 7 – 8:00pm DNA Lounge
• Mac Mingle @ Macworld Expo 2009
  Thu, Jan 8 – 7:00pm Jillian’s @ Metreon
• Macworld 2009 Closeout meetup (6th Annual)
  Fri, Jan 9 – 8:00pm 4th Street Bar and Deli

Those that were lacking in an actual LOLCat slide featured lots of LOLSpeak. I know we’re discussing the web, but do we have to insert LOLSpeak everywhere? (of course we do. duh.)

I urge you to check out the slides. There were many informative presentations this year from our friends across in Berlin and abroad.

They called me one of the “good guys”. Heh!

You can listen to it here:

http://datasecurityblog.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/data-security-podcast-episode-13-aug-11-2008/

For a conference that is so technically minded, they didn’t post the conference schedule in a useful format (HTML only! ew!), so I converted the web pages to iCal format with quite a bit of scripting and cutting/pasting.

Just download the following zip, import it into iCal, and you should have a (fairly) complete conference schedule to carry with you on your iPod, iPhone, or any device that can read iCal/vCalendar formats.

This schedule includes everything except the contest area and very-long descriptions of each event. I decided not to include the contest area because most events run all day, or most of the days. Since the rooms for each of the conference tracks haven’t been announced yet, there’s very little in the way of room locations in these files. Sorry, but you’ll have to figure it out when you get to the Riveria!

The events are broken out into the five tracks in five seperate files, and a seperate ics file for Defcon Social events and meetups. Unpack the zip, and import each file into iCal.

Click here for the zipfile of .ics files

Once you;ve downloaded the zips, double click to unzip them, then import to iCal. If the system asks you what calendar to put events into, just click ‘New’, and our ICS files will fill in the rest.