Posts from Sunday, March 11th, 2007

Something for you 2007 SXSW Interactive attendees: if you need to get to the rooms-in-exile (8, 9, and 10), you can skip the line for the elevator.  Here’s how:

1. Get yourself to the ground floor.
2. Walk past the Lego®-infested play area and the fruit smoothie stand into the deserted hallway on the west side of the center, along Trinity Street.
3. Keep walking.  Just about the time you become convinced that you’ve gone entirely the wrong way, there will be an escalator.  Take it up.
4. And there you are.  There will be a badge checkpoint, although quite possibly one without a badge checker.  There wasn’t one at 9:55am this morning.

When you leave said rooms, you can go back by the same escalator or use the staircase near the elevators.  I’d recommend using the stairs to come up, except they’re locked to entry from the ground floor and I haven’t gotten my hands on any duct tape yet.  Ten community karma points to the person who hacks around this problem as well, though they’re a little bit harder to spot than the escalator.  Pass it on.

• Getting To the Other Part of SXSWi was published on Sunday, March 11th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been three replies.

For me, SXSW 2007 was over almost as soon as it started.  That’s because my one and only panel, “A Decade of Style”, was in the first Saturday morning slot.  It seemed to go pretty well, thanks to the great folks who agreed to be on the panel and some sharp audience questions.  Now I have nought to do but attend the sessions that seem the most interesting and catch up with some folks I haven’t seen in quite a while.

It’s great being here, and I love seeing everyone, but in all honesty I’m starting to think about leaving a day or three early.  I miss my wife and daughter.  A lot.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to apologize to anyone I inadvertently ignored, insulted, or misidentified on Friday.  I was dead tired, having had to get up at 3:30am to catch the first leg of my trip to Austin.  As I’m sure you know, when the alarm goes off at 3:30am, it isn’t ringing at the end of a full night’s sleep.  In my case, not even close.

So I spent yesterday in kind of a moderate-functioning daze, and kept mistaking people for other people.  Three times (that I know of) I put the wrong name to a face, and these are people I’ve known for a while.  Seriously, at one point I identified Brian Alvey as Aaron Gustafson.  After I introduced him to someone else as Aaron, I then proceeded to talk with him about what he’s been doing at AOL and about his house in the suburbs of New York City.  After he excused himself to go grab something to eat, someone asked me who it was, and I told them it was Aaron and that I worked with him on A List Apart.  I swear this all made perfect sense to me at the time.  There was absolutely no sense of mental discontinuity whatsoever.

It was only two hours later, when I ran into Aaron at the Big Bag pickup desk, that I realized what had happened.  What went through my head was pretty much, “Hey, you’re… not who I was talking to earlier.”

So if I did something like that to you, I’m really sorry.  I got a ton of sleep last night and am now back to my usual level of not being able to remember people’s names.

• South by… What Was I Saying? was published on Sunday, March 11th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been five replies.