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Rich
Sixty-three degrees and sunny
Monday, March 17th at 9:11 p.m. • 0 comments
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.
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