Walking Over a Digital Grave

As part of SXSW, I contribute to the SXSW Baby website with a daily podcast from the conference floor. Because of that, and like many at SXSW, I came under the wonderful embrace of Brad Graham. Brad suddenly died in January, which has put a tinge of sadness over SXSW for many, including myself.

The tradition of “Break Bread with Brad” on the first night of SXSW ran for almost ten years, and while he won’t be with us this year, Break Bread For Brad will be on the first night of SXSW as usual. More details are on the SXSW Baby blog.

Because of his unplanned departure, SXSW Baby, which Brad took over from a long line of people, including Evan Williams, was still mostly a Brad running and co-ordinating all the writers effort. And there was only one super-admin to the blog, the forums and all the bits and pieces behind the site (it was rather tightly tied to the rest of Brad’s rather expansive hosting of sites).

So I had one last thing to do before leaving for the US today, which was to get back into control of the blog, and make sure two or three people had full access to the site to keep it running over this SXSW, then we can decide who it will be passed on to.

It’s rather like the Dread Pirate Roberts, and now I’ve thought that, I can clearly see brad in the Westley outfit. Or in Westley.

Essentially doing some white-hat hacking into someone else’s life is very strange and unsettling. It’s done now, and I hope that Brad doesn’t mind.