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When people think of Texas, I don’t think rain is something that comes up in their minds, yet that’s what it did Sunday night, rain. It was unfortunate this happened our last night of the conference. We didn’t get to meet many new people and most of the night consisted of drying off between stints of running in the rain, a lot. It’s ok though, we still managed to catch a few shows and play some foosball on the way home from The Fray Cafe. Let me just say, Leslie couldn’t handle me on the table (-; After wringing our clothes out, we went to sleep. It was a nice memory that escaped me the night before.

We woke up to a sunny Austin morning and wished we had a few more days to stay, but work called, so we had to get all we could out of that day. It turns out chance favored us.

The Panels

Scaling Your Community
Jeff and I both arrived late into the first round of panels, this one was the second of the day. We are both very glad we made it as this was our favorite panel of the conference. It wasn’t so much of a panel as it was a speech. Matt Mullenweg, of the Wordpress fame, talked about scaling a community. His talk covered four main points; starting simple, bootstrapping, letting go, and embracing it. No better person to give this discussion as his Wordpress software is used by thousands of people around the world. Oh, and Matt is 23, which means he was developing Wordpress while most of us were boozing in college. The good thing though is that Matt comes across as an old soul. He was the most comfortable speaker we saw and by the end of the presentation, the audience was eating out of his hand. I think I cried a little.

Dan Rather Keynote Interview
This panel consisted of Dan Rather being interviewed by Jane Hamsher. Essentially Dan Rather thinks the problem with journalism today is it’s lack of spine. I agree. It was really interesting to see such a prominent media figure in a room packed with geeks. Especially the fact that everyone walked out of there saying how good it was. Geeks are hard to please, and in doing that, Dan Rather proved his cross-generation appeal. Not a bad for a last panel.

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We then headed back to our hotel picked up our stuff. A short cab ride away (with a very friendly cab driver) put us at the ticket counter of Northwest Airlines. It’s about six hours of travel to go from Portland to Austin, but well worth it. I have a love for Austin I never knew existed. I am definitely going to head back next year.