It's the last day of South by Southwest and I'm finally finding a moment to blog about things.

The sessions here have been good, not great. Henry Jenkins was great.

But overall, there isn't alot of what's new, it's more about what's hot. Making money off of video is hot, thinking that web sites can change the world are hot, and obsessing over design is hot.

A few good moments:

• Seeing drunk geeks limbo under a glowing light saber.


• Getting the best swag of the show, a Flickr lens cleaner. BTW, the Yahoo party had the best food.


• Eating lunch everyday at Champions so my brother Matt could watch basketball.


• Meeting a woman when when choosing between giving up alcohol, sex, and cheese for Lent, chose cheese.


• Having Robert Scoble try to steal the beer I was bringing to Heathervescent.


• Paying $4 for a Starbucks Doubleshot can.


• Meeting Neal Pollack at a bar, not knowing who he was, and thinking he was rather unfunny.
       Update: Some (who didn't pay attention in English class) think that I am saying that that Neal is not funny. In fact, I am using irony, because Neal is, in fact, funny.


• Eating pizza while drunk at 2AM when the daylight savings switch happened on Saturday night.


• Watching my brother sleep through the Dan Rather Keynote with a can of Monster energy drink in his hand.


• Seeing Ze Frank at the web awards. He's just as funny live and in-person.

Here's my SxSW story about The Liberation of the Alcohol:

On Saturday night, we ended up at a party called 8-Bit. The 8-Bit party was huge and it was packed. Here is the layout of the party.

As you can see, the larger part of the party was served by a beer bar, and liquor was seperated into a seperate concentration camp. I and others felt that this was patently unfair and prejudiced against liquor.

Thankfully, my co-worker Scott came upon the idea of how to liberate the liquor from it's camp and into the freedom of the larger party.

The trick was to walk over to the liquor camp and order a drink. Then casually walk over and place the drink on top of one of the wooden fence posts. Next, leave the liquor camp and walk past the guards empty handed and back into the beer camp. Finally (and with stealth) walk over to the fence posts and liberate the liquor into the freedom of the beer area.

This underground railroad of booze operated just fine for quite a while. However, no good thing lasts forever. I bumped into Michael Buffington and asked if he wanted on the liberation team. He ethusiastically joined up and we made yet another foray into the barren liquor zone. We got the drink, placed them on fence posts and took the long walk. Upon the moment of liquor retrieval, Mike was so excited he said something to someone on the other side of the fence (very un-ninja-like) and the bar manager woke from his Col. Klink style nap, hopped up and busted us.

This put an end to the liberation scheme and we forced to return to the liquor camp to consume our drinks. Fortunately, this was near closing time, and we were soon booted out of the party completely to wander drunkenly back toward Sixth Street to find pizza.

Posted by michael at March 13, 2007 10:32 AM