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- March 11, 2007
SXSW Sunday: “Heroes”, The Show for Web 2.0 Enthusiasts
March 11, 2007Read moreI might be imagining it, but I’ve been noticing that the television show Heroes comes up a lot in conversation here at SXSW, or “South by” as it seems to be called by the natives. “Do you watch Heroes?” is one of those questions that seems to pop up just before you’re about to cross the threshold of mere acquaintance to actual friendship. If you watch Heroes, that says that you believe in good, evil, doing the right thing, following your inner geek, building alliances, and searching for purpose in a world of seemingly infinite possibility and coincidence. And you’re probably working on a new community-driven Web 2.0 application, building a brand new conversational marketing model for your business, or pushing the frontier of digital convergence. The question has even been asked by panel moderators…”How many people here have seen Heroes?” Colin Devroe’s been making the rounds for Viddler, the video sharing community startup, scaring people like me with surprise interviews. And yes, he asked me about Heroes. I guess that means we’re buds now.
Sunday was an odd day, feeling much like a rainy Wednesday. I was a rather hermit-like mood, but I decided not to let it bother me because I was “wasting” the opportunity to meet a zillion people.
- March 11, 2007
SXSW Saturday: Owning My Solitude!
March 11, 2007Read more[I’m going to back-annotate this post with links later…]
I awoke on Saturday morning with an odd feeling of dread mixed with elation, as I looked forward to another day of meeting in groups with random people and wondering what to say! When I’m faced with a situation like this, I have a choice: rush into it and be brave, or question the assumption that Ineed to know what to say. I decided that today, I would just mellow out and not worry about it so much. I would own my solitude.
- March 10, 2007
Friday SXSW Kickoff
March 10, 2007Read moreThough it’s not really even a full festival day, I found it plenty exhausting. At first I was wondering if my natural hermit-like tendencies would win out…I spent way too much time in my hotel room this morning. To my relief, I ran into several people who I knew, or knew me from last year.
- March 9, 2007
Local Flavor
March 9, 2007Read moreSeveral years ago I stumbled upon Gothamist, which is a city blog written by locals covering New York City. I really liked the local color of the reporting, and of course there’s writeups about interesting food; this writeup of by Jen Chung about how she ran into Jeffrey Steingarten at a BBQ event is a good example. It’s since grown into a urban blog network covering many major cities, Austinist being one of them. When I get home, I should check out Bostonist again to see if it’s gotten livelier; when it first launched, it was a bit understaffed on the writing side I thought.
Anyway, I’m in Austin and I’m hungry, so I searched Austinist for recommendations and got last year’s SXSW Chowdown Guide. Just what I needed. Now I have a purpose for getting out of the hotel room.
Today’s Itinerary
- Kill time until around noon, when I head over to the Austin Convention Center to get registered. Maybe explore the area a bit. Study the bus routes. Do some more research on places to go and see.
Noonish – head over to the convention center, check out the Interactive Playpen,
630PM – New England Dinner with Ian, Kelley, and maybe more, so we can start to form our first day scooby gang alliances. A quick cab ride!
830PM – Then I want to check out the BlogHer Meetup because I like the whole idea of empowerment that pervades the organization, and would like to talk to people about what it means to be a part of it. There’s something very similar to what they do and what I want to do, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
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p>Of course, all bets are off if I collide with anyone I know and get steered elsewhere…this seemed to happen a lot last year, and it was kind of neat to just go with the flow. We’ll see how that goes.
- March 9, 2007
Google Transit and ‘Dillos
March 9, 2007Read moreGoogle has been teaming up with public transit authorities around the country; I just read on Austinist that they’ve gotten the Austin Capital Metro database in, so you can now plan your public transit bus trip complete with maps and walking guides. Just in time for SXSW! Awesome! Here’s an example: the route from my hotel to the BlogHer meetup.
Unfortunately they don’t cover Boston for when I get home—good luck with that mess! There are also some caveats for public transit noobs like me. The last time I rode a bus was when I was living as a non-Chinese speaking kid in Taiwan, and I used to memorize routes by landmarks and cross my fingers. I had a few scary (for a kid) adventures, and as a result I have the tendency to over-prepare my travel plans as an adult. So here’s what I learned the hard way as a kid:
- The return trip may not be the same bus or road
- There are alternate bus routes. Google Transit just picks what it thinks is the best one, and I’ve noticed small differences in how it picks the starting bus stand on the route. Nothing big.
- Buses tend to have hours of operation, so best check what they are. I am still looking into this.
Capital Metro, the city transit authority, also runs these free trolleys called the ‘Dillo, which I may ride today to just get a feel for the city if I don’t run into someone first. This is the first time I’ve arrived early enough in a city to explore it. According to this map I grabbed from the hotel lobby, the following Dillo routes seem to cover the nearby area:
- 470 – Tour the Town – Goes as far north as the university of Texas (21st St), circles the State House along the way, and then comes back down south over the river on Congress Ave to “Spyglass Road”, whatever that is.
- 450 – Orange ‘Dillo
- 451 – Silver ‘Dillo
- 455 – Red ‘Dillo
- 461 – Gold ‘Dillo
- 462 – Blue ‘Dillo
- 463 – Starlight ‘Dillo
So grab the maps and schedules and go for a ride!
