From my comment queue, possibly the first time I feel a spammer is really speaking to me as a person:
Did u ever heard about CSS…? it will help your site.
Do tell, oh random anonymous stranger whose site URL crudely references the genitalia of older females! I wish to learn.
Wow.
Just wow.
I’m back home and I still can’t believe how amazing An Event Apart Boston was for me and everyone with whom I talked. I knew going in it was a great lineup of speakers covering great topics. I knew that we had a completely kick-ass staff in place, and amazing volunteers to help us out. I knew that we’d have great support from the venue.
I knew all that, and I was still overwhelmed and ecstatic at how things went. At least on one level. On another, thanks to the aforementioned kick-ass staff, things went so smoothly that I almost felt like I was a speaker at someone else’s conference. I had so little to worry about that it was sometimes hard to remember that this was all happening because Jeffrey and I, over breakfast at Las Manitas in Austin, decided to take a chance and put on a show. In a way, I had to prod myself just a little to remember to feel pride in what we’d accomplished.
What required no effort to feel was a deep sense of humility and awe that so many people had come to support what we did. Over five hundred folks gathered in Boston, drawn by the same love of the web and pride in Doing Things Right that drives us. I see the attendees at AEA as the craftsmen and women of the web. Sure, there are shops mass-producing sites, the way a factory churns out cheap clocks. That’s fine if you just want something to put on your nightstand. But if you want an elegant, finely tuned work of art that you’d hang in a prominent place, a clock that is as much a point of pride as a timepiece—you find a craftsman. And that’s who came to Boston. That’s who comes to An Event Apart.
What amazed me even more was the overwhelming wave of positive feedback that we got. Marci, our event manager, told me that in 25 years of event planning, she’s never seen attendees so happy. So many people came up to me and Jeffrey and Marci just to say, “Thank you so much for doing this”. They were thanking us, which seems entirely backwards. I did thank each of them for coming to the event, but let me state it here for anyone I didn’t get to thank in person. Thank you so much for coming to AEA and showing that you know creating the web is much more than churning out code, and that you take pride in being a craftsman. Thank you for making the show so amazing. Without you, it couldn’t have happened at all.
Now I’m looking forward to AEA Seattle twice as much as before, and I thought I was already maxed out on anticipation.
Again: wow. Thank you, one and all.
Five minutes after I should have left for the airport to catch my flight to Boston and An Event Apart, I finally got the DSL service back, four and a half days after it went dark. After a few minutes of frantic testing and configuration to make sure it would work for Kat in my absence, I blew out the door.
Guess what’s broken in my hotel room.
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:
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.
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.
I know that you don’t need to be told this, but I’m just going to put this on record for anyone who might be Googling for the information in the future, not to mention the four separate people who got this wrong within the last 24 hours. It’s like this:
My last name is spelled M-E-Y-E-R. No trailing “s”; an “e” to each side of the “y”; no “a” anywhere within its bounds. Got it? Good!
Also, it’s “Eric” with a “c”, not a “k” or even a “ck”. ‘kay?
So how does your name get misspelled, and how much does it bother you?