by Haggis (Sean Loyless)
March 14th, 2009 @ 1:14 am
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SxSWi Journal Entry 1
Today was my very first day at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. Most of the afternoon was spent working with Blellow setting up the booth and trying to get a SxSXi badge, all of which happened within hours of each other.
Unfortunately my boss was feeling under the weather, so they all retired to the rent house leaving me alone to terrorize the streets of Austin. I just happened to run into my friend Henry (or Smokin, as he’s known on this very blog) while he was going up the escalator to pick up his badge, so I was able to hook up with him later on. I got a chance to meet the fine folks at Pajiba, Dustin Rowles, Frank, and Seth, all of who are not only great people, and ended up buying me many drinks later in the night (more on this later).
After hanging out at the convention center, (and meeting Derrick from FriendFeed), I decided to break outside my shell and mingle a bit in the growing number of tech and film enthusiasts in Austin.
I started the night by walking about 10-12 blocks down to the Belmont for the Techset meets the Ratpack party. I arrived a little early, so I killed time at the bar and had a lovely discussion with a representative of uStream.com.
Once the party started it got pretty wild fast. As I was standing in the midst of the crowd talking to two interesting guys from Vancouver, Canada, lo and behold Jeffery Tambor (George Sr. From Arrested Devlepment) makes his way through the crowd.
The conversation I had with him was something like this:
Jeffery: “Wow, this is pretty wild, huh?”
Me: “Yeah no kidding! I’m a huge fan of yours, I’m so happy to meet you!” (shakes hand)
Jeffery: “Thanks! I like your hat.”
Me: (Flabbergasted and speechless)
Erica O’Grady introduced me to Hugh McLoud, aka Gaping Void of “Cartoons on the back of business cards.” He even drew me a special card that said “Fuck You, I’m at SxSW 2009!” I was pleased to get a custom card form him, as I’ve been following his work for several years now and was quite a fan.
After much searching and Twitter DM’ing, I finally tracked down my FriendFeed friend Mark Krynsky, and we decided to head down to Emo’s for the “Pastries and Pasties” Burlesque show, only to turn away at the $15 cover charge at the door. We ended up at the Rio Grande a few blocks away and met back up with my friend Henry. After a few drinks the restaurant was closing, so as Mark left to Chugging Monkey to track down Kevin Rose, I left with Henry and the Pajiba crew for many more beers and some interesting discussion of the movie Bridges of Madison County.
Tomorrow is day two, and if it’s at all like today then I have nothing but good conversation and meeting a lot of wonderful and exciting new people to look forward to. So far this has been the start of the best week of my life.
If you would like to connect with me at SxSW Interactive, I’ll be in the Blellow booth for most of the weekend, and after hours terrorizing the streets of Austin. Link up with me through Twitter!
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