Three Night Stand

Sixty-three degrees and sunny

My apologies for not writing the last entry sooner. I’ve come down with a cough, sore throat and runny nose since returning from Austin. Take note: You meet a lot of people at SXSW and there are a lot of germs floating around, in addition to the usual crop of STDs.

My last day at SXSW on Wednesday was a first goodbye to Rachel.

We promised to keep talking. She climbed into one of two taxis. And she left wearing the same wool coat she came in wearing.

I took the taxi for the convention center to meet with Daniel for lunch at Stubb’s Bar-B-Q, where on the way I saw an expired parking meter whose LCD display was encoded to “FAIL.” Only in Austin. And during lunch:

Me: “Are you hungry?”

Daniel: “No, are you?”

Me: “Not really.”

Overheard during lunch from another table, apparently, the SXSW Facebook party at Pangaea wasn’t such a great hit with the cash bar. Cash bar? For a company estimated (by some crazies) to be worth $15 billion? Maybe they were trying to keep Sarah Lacy from showing up. Oh, wait, she was there.

After lunch, two girls from a public relations agency stopped us for a “vlog” interview. On camera, they asked us what we were hoping to get out of SXSW (free booze), what websites we couldn’t live without (Daniel said Pownce and Digg; he literally couldn’t live without the latter), and what we thought about social networks.

Huh.

Y’know. Because Daniel actually spoke on a panel about that very topic. Not that that makes a difference, right? The two said the interview would appear on the company’s blog; I’m not going to hold my breath, but it would be fun to see it.

Update: Wow, it got up, but it’s only a short clip. It’s around 2:10 in, and I’m smiling like a silly bastard.

I met Todd Sieling, a Ma.gnolia developer, and Mel Kirk, of o’, humble Internet fame. I didn’t recognize her at first (“What was her name? Melody? Molly? Ohhhh…now I remember.”) And so I sat, hands on chair and feet a’ swinging, waiting for an introduction. I doubt she would have remembered a word with me but — sometimes — people react to name dropping, and I think she’ll remember me the next time, be it a good or bad thing.

Daniel and I caught the Considerations for Scalabale Web Ventures panel, which truly reinforced the notion that I am an Internet noob, and that I am going to continue fiddling with rounded corners and gradients. Did you know that during some traffic peaks, Flickr serves 32,000 images per second?

And when the panel finished, I said goodbye to Daniel. Leah gave me her chicken wrap. I paid $35.07 to a taxi driver and flew 195 miles in 170 minutes at 36,000 feet. I watched the last half of Carson Daly. And I missed Moby.

The lines were long. The panels were short on knowledge. Yet South by Southwest was easily the best part of my year and most of last, too.

Next time, I’ll book a hotel a little closer. I’ll register a little earlier. And maybe then I’ll make a website worthy of the experience.

Monday, March 17th at 9:11 p.m. • 0 comments

The one where boning is socially acceptable

The next day at SXSW was actually a bit rainy and overcast. So, naturally Rachel spent an extra 15 minutes straightening her hair and getting glammed up for the 2008 Bloggies for her nomination as a “Best-kept Secret Weblog.”

She was super nervous as the video at the end of this post will show you.

I never told her, but in my blogging hey-day (good Lord, I sound old), I wanted to win a Bloggie pretty badly back in 2004. So to go with her simply, I was impressed and content just to be there. So I’m arm candy. I’m OK with that! (In fact, I think it’s pretty freaking awesome.)

The awards had its own live chat in #Bloggies on irc.freenode.net on IRC. Naturally, only about 3 people (myself included) probably knew how to use IRC, so it was there that I smack talked like a petty troll on Rachel’s behalf where it was projected onto a large wall adjacent to the stage.

Unfortunately, the person from So Very Alone won the “Best-kept Secret Weblog” award. I don’t think it’s right for me to give my opinion on this matter, but I’ll leave you with this select quotation from his (her?) About page:

I’m ordinary-looking, and I’m rarely — if ever — rude. I guess, in a lot of ways, I’m pretty normal.

So why do I feel like I’m drowning?

Yikes. Nice design, too.

I went to the Browser Wars: Deja Vu All Over Again? panel, which wasn’t so great. A representative from Apple’s Webkit team didn’t show up, which took away a big chunk of what could have made the time spent valuable. I believe the room filled to capacity; but for what? I mostly checked out mentally when they started bickering over what “open” really meant and the “limitations” of Apple’s iPhone.

While I’m sitting in a stuffy room full of nerds and bad fluorescent lighting, I get notified that someone proposed to a girl to marry him at the keynote of Frank Warren, creator of PostSecret. I miss all of the good stuff, argh!

But the next panel was the one I was looking forward to the most: Design Eye for South By, the one with, y’know, actual design work behind it. Just to clarify any confusion on what happened to Jeff at the panel, the panelists were talking about what people do at SXSW and what’s important to them and how the website could realign to those ends.

Things like talking, socializing, partying, and…that’s when one panelist said, “Unless you’re Jeff Croft, then you’re boning.” Wow, that was pretty awesome. That’s OK. I think Jeff liked it.

We caught dinner at P.F. Chang’s with Andrei, Bronwyn, Ryan, Mike and to a lesser degree Keith and Wilson (sitting at other tables). As someone who had been reading their blogs and articles for the past four or five years, I was stunned at how cool and relaxed and friendly everyone was.

I wish I could say I lived it up my last night in Austin, but I spent it, um, doing homework, and going to the Blue Flavor’s party at the Iron Cactus for not even a couple of hours. It was a slow and short night, but easily my favorite and most memorable.

Thursday, March 13th at 4:59 p.m. • 1 comment