Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

SxSW 2006 Day 5

The fifth and final day of my inau­gural SxSW expe­ri­ence started, well, late. After return­ing to my hotel the night before (well, ear­lier that morn­ing to be more accu­rate) I had all inten­tions of wak­ing up at 9am Tues­day, but appar­ently I was sleep­ing heav­ily enough to ignore a nuke going off next to my head…

Soooo, after get­ting to the Con­ven­tion Cen­ter around lunch time, and hang­ing out with other tired folks in the hall­way, my first panel of the last day was Dogma Free Design (yes, the 3:30pm panel… oh hush…). I had been look­ing for­ward to this panel, but I was let down — there was a lot of talk about “check­lists” and how to deal with large orga­ni­za­tions’ propen­sity to require (nay, indulge in) mounds of unnec­es­sary (use­less?) paper­work, excel spread­sheets, etc. Not that the sub­ject mat­ter wasn’t impor­tant to a cer­tain seg­ment of the audi­ence, but I think the title and descrip­tion of the panel were mis­lead­ing. Mov­ing on…

I came very close indeed to skip­ping the final ses­sion in favor of eat­ing (some­thing I didn’t do much of all week), but a few smart folks I respect were head­ing in, so I fol­lowed duti­fully into the standing-room-only audi­ence (actu­ally, I ended up sit­ting on the floor behind some chairs, it was that crowded). As it turns out, Bruce Sterling’s “The State of the World” was quite enter­tain­ing, and even a wee bit enlight­en­ing in a few spots. With­out get­ting into polit­i­cal rants, as a child of a limey, I’ve always been aware of the dif­fer­ence in per­cep­tion when out­side the U.S. bor­ders (a lot of the world news I was exposed to while grow­ing up came from the BBC and other sources my mum gath­ered), so it was easy to appre­ci­ate some of the com­men­tary Bruce had to share, espe­cially on issues such as “Glob­al­iza­tion vs. Amer­i­can­iza­tion”. There were a few mov­ing moments dur­ing the hour, and I’m glad I changed tacks and stayed for it.

After a quick stop at the Registrant’s Lounge, a few of us gath­ered at Moon­shine for a SxSW last sup­per (you get to pick who played Jesus…). I know I’m going to miss a few names here, but my din­ner dates included Faruk, Matthew, Anton, Jonathan (sorry my brain left you out mate :), Eris, Steve, Steve, Bryan, David, Zach, Eric (whom I actu­ally met the night before thanks to Eris; he’s on the Blog­ger team at Google, it’s nice to meet the peo­ple who actu­ally make my Blog­ger tem­plate run…) and a bunch of other peo­ple who were equally nice but at the other end of the table. This was def­i­nitely one of the high­lights of the week for me, since it gave us all the oppor­tu­nity to dis­cuss the week, our best and worst moments, most sur­pris­ing moments, and what we would be tak­ing home from the expe­ri­ence. The food was almost as good as the com­pany, and you know it’s a good time when even pay­ing the bill is a non-stressful event :)

The rest of the evening fea­tured the smash­ing Media Tem­ple clos­ing party (view Bryan’s pics), where I finally had the chance to meet both the fan­tas­tic Veerle (yes, yes, her redesign is ter­rific, but she’s a per­son too… ;) and Leslie, Shaun’s beau­ti­ful fiancee (nice catch, both of you :)

After enjoy­ing the free drinks (poor Zach enjoyed more than his fair share I think…), the last stop of the night was the Red Bull house, which was, um, really really fun… and not just because of the mul­ti­player Halo 2 (yes, Bryan kicked my sorry white ass…) — suf­fice it to say that this was another one of the high­lights of my week (except when Eris lost her phone, which caused much dis­tress to all of us who were there… but she found it even­tu­ally, and thus order was restored to the world).

I found a taxi as late as I pos­si­bly could (3am or so), picked up my lap­top from Anton and Matthew’s room at the Hilton, took another taxi back to my hotel, packed, and hit the lobby just as the air­port shut­tle arrived. Hap­pily, just before board­ing I was able to spend a lit­tle more time with Steve and Jim (one of Steve’s col­leagues at the Notre Dame Web Group), which capped off the trip quite nicely.

This was by far the best week of my life — and I don’t say that lightly, but rather with much rev­er­ence for the peo­ple who made it so. Thank you all.

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Tuesday, March 21st, 2006.

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