One-track minds

Oliver Burkeman's wrap-up of SXSW was filled with not just salient insight, but also haunting observations.

"We drive ourselves to cope with ever-increasing workloads by working longer hours, sucking down coffee and spurning recuperation," he wrote, warning all of us we are human, not computers.

But nothing leapt off the page and grabbed me quite like this line: "The vaguely intimidating twentysomethings who prowl the corridors of the Austin Convention Centre, juggling coffee cups, iPad 2s and the festival's 330-page schedule of events ..."

(An aside: There's a post just waiting to be written about a 330-page schedule of events at a tech event packed full of green-leaning folks toting iPads. "Do we really have to sell a print ad?" "Oh, just bundle it with the banner and the sponsorship for the meet-up afterward and you'll be fine.")

What really struck me was the "Vaguely intimidating twentysomethings." They know how the Internet works, they know of rails and scripts, of embedding and tagging, of a bunch of other stuff I'm trying to catch up on.

I was wondering where they found the time to get ahead of the rest of us, how they did it, how they do it. And then I read this and didn't feel quite so envious.