I tried to use my house key to unlock the door at the high school today. I was about to be late for my class so I was probably rushing just a bit.
Luckily, a student came running out the door just as I was trying to go in. After I dodged him and his giant backpack I caught the door and went in.
Just in case anyone’s wondering – the days when students would open the door for a teacher are long gone…
Maybe it’s just because it’s late at night and I’m tired, but this quote seems to really speak to me right now:
Obstacles are what you see when you turn your eyes away from the goal.
– Joseph Cossmann
What do you think?
I just made the big switch from MovableType to WordPress. So far it seems to be going pretty smoothly. I’m sure I’ll regret saying that later…
Work has been crazy this week. Things are sometimes calm after spring break, but no such luck this year. Anyway, here’s a little more information about what I did during South-by-Southwest…
The first thing I saw was the Jason Fried / Jim Coudal opening keynote. For me, that one talk was probably worth the price of admission. I’ve read all of 37signals‘ ideas about building web applications, but somehow actually hearing and seeing Jason Fried say the words made it a lot more meaningful. Jim Coudal was also a great speaker. I would probably say he was the better speaker of the two, but almost everyone in the audience seemed to be a Jason Fried fanboy.
There were so many other sessions I sometimes had a hard time deciding where to go. DOM Scripting with Jeremy Keith and Aaron Gustafson was a great introduction to JavaScript and the Document Object Model. Sink or Swim with , Evan Williams, Josua Schachter and a couple of other guys had some good advice for business owners. The Sunday keynote with Jason Kottke and Heather Armstrong was a lot of fun. The Microformats talk really opened my eyes to what all the fuss was about. I feel like microformats are going to be very important soon.
I got several books signed while I was there – Designing With Web Standards, DOM Scripting, and CSS Mastery. All of the authors were extremly nice. Geeky guys don’t take to being treated like stars very well. Some people got their picture taken with Zeldman and I could tell he thought that was a little weird. Yes, I did take his picture, but I didn’t stand next to him and hug him. I guess that makes me just half weird.
Overall I had a great time and I was very impressed with the convention. It was great to be able to watch people speak at a session and then be able to bump into them in the halls or sit next to them at another session. It didn’t seem like some exclusive event where the speakers were wisked away in limos. Everyone seemed really easy going and eager to share their ideas.
There was only one session that I left early and that was mainly because it was the end of the day and the lighting in the room was turned down low. For me it was either leave or fall asleep.
I hope I get to go again next year and from now on. Who knows, maybe one of these years I’ll even get up on the stage and talk about something.
It’s hard to believe that I’m back at work.
Well, not really. I’m sitting at my desk, staring at my laptop, with the server humming over in the corner. It would be harder for me to believe I’m anywhere else. I guess it’s just hard to believe that spring break is already over.
South-by-Southwest was great. I’ll try to post a full update later today covering everything I saw. In the mean time, I did take a few pictures while I was there. You can see of few of my pictures at Flickr.com.
Also, they’ve posted audio from a few of the sessions. The Opening Remarks by Jason Fried and Jim Coudal are worth the download, as well as Jason Kottke and Heather Armstrong’s Keynote Conversation.
It’s seems like just about every weblog I’ve look at lately says the same thing:
I’m off to Austin for South by Southwest!
I don’t know what else to say other than: Me, too.
We’re leaving at around 5:00am in the morning and will hopefully be in Austin by 10:00am. We’ll be spending the evenings with Geoff and Tony and coming home Tuesday night.
It’s going to be great to get to listen to and meet some of my web designer / developer heroes like Joel Spolsky, Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Fried and many others. I’m even going to bring a few books for signing.
I had a hard time deciding which sessions to attend. Almost all of them were interesting to me. I’ll be booked solid from 10:00am until 6:00pm every day. There are also parties every night until at least midnight, but I’m afraid I’ll be too wiped out afer a full day of sessions to attend any of these.
Hopefully this will be the inspiration and motivation that I need to finally finish a few of the programs that I’ve been working on for the last few years. I haven’t forgotten my new years resolutions yet. I still have to make at least $1000 this year from something other than my day job.
I’ll be taking lots of pictures on the trip and hopefully updating this site with notes about what I’m doing. Check back tomorrow evening to see if I survived the first day…