SXSW Day #3 & #4

Day 3 of SXSW Interactive was actually pretty damned incredible. The panels were (for the most part) quite interesting and the after parties bordered on epic. Day 4 was spent initially recovering from Day 3, but the panels weren't overly interesting so instead I spent the day walking around downtown Austin.

So, Panel wise for Sunday I managed to hit the following:

• Anything But Typical: Learning to Love JavaScript Prototypes
• Valerie Casey Keynote Address
• Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
• David Eagleman
• CouchDB: The Definitive Guide

Anything But Typical: Learning to Love JavaScript Prototypes was not the most compelling talk of the conference and it ended short, after about 30 minutes. It was also one of the more technically in-depth panels I've been to here and I think it was worth my time. Granted, I can't say I learned anything knew, but I will say that my understanding of JavaScript prototypes is now deeper. That is to say, I've read how to use prototypes, I've screwed around with them to a limited degree, but it was really useful to see them put into use properly in a non-insignificant way.

Valerie Casey Keynote Address was an accident. Well, my attendance of it was, at least. I was at lunch and Kevin texted me to tell me that he was going to the HTML 5 presentation and if I was done by 2 I should join him. Sadly, when I got there at 2:05 there was a line out the door and they were turning people away. It's not a huge loss, however, because I got the impression they just went deeper on the same material that was covered during the CSS3/HTML 5 talk I had gone to on Friday. It would've been nice to catch but it's not the end of the world that I didn't.

Now, SXSW can be frustrating because your panels suck and you can't find anything better. It can also be exciting because you stumble into a panel that you had no intention of attending and discover that it was actually quite awesome. That's what happened with the Valerie Casey keynote address for me. Now, I haven't dug too deep into her story/background (her official site is here at valcasey.com) but basically she seem to spend a lot of time doing sustainability systems consulting. And by that, I infer, she looks at different industries and examines the system that they are part of, and how it relates to the environment, and then makes suggestions for how to reduce environmental impact, etc.

Whatever. There's a lot of people out there concerned about the environment.

What made her talk so particularly interesting was her actual analysis of systems and, in fact, what that means. She told a story about her mentor/author type of person (named Grace something, if I remember correctly. I didn't have my laptop with me so I wasn't taking notes) and how this woman would convey what's necessary to understand a system and the story went like this: at the beginning of class she'd go up to the front of the room and put a box on the podium. She opens that box and pulls out a slinky and sets it on the podium next to the box. Then she picks up the slinky and places it on the palm of her hand and holds it out in front her. With her other hand she grabs the slink about about a third of the way from the top and pulls her hand out from beneath the slinky with predictable results. The slinks falls to the floor and oscillates up and down it's length.

She then asks the class: Why did that happen? To which everyone answers: Well, because you removed your hand from underneath the slinky.

Fair enough.

Next, she picks up the box the slinky came in and places it on the palm of her hand and holds it out in front her. With her other hand she grabs it about a third of the way down from the top and pulls her hand out from underneath and, of course, the box doesn't fall to the ground or, really, do anything else all that interesting.

She then tells the class: You cannot understand the effect an action will have on a system until you first understand the potential that is built into the structure of the system itself.

Brilliant.

I could go on for this for awhile, actually, because it was really interesting, but instead I will try to keep an eye out for the podcast that should be up in the not too distant future and link to it here.

Next up was Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives is a book written by David Eagleman. Again, this was just another happy accident I ran into this year. I was sitting in the readers room waiting for the CouchDB talk to begin and this was guy was reading selections from his book, which is 40 short stories he has written over the past 7 years. And, again, he was ridiculously enthralling.

The premise of the stories is this: each story takes place in the afterlife, in one form or another, and typically has a little ironic or ridiculous point to make, mostly about the nature of people themselves. And, you know, from the selections I heard, I was quite impressed with both the content and the quality of the writing. (So impressed, actually, that I fired up my Amazon app on my iphone and ordered the book during the middle of his talk.) Anyway, he spent 20 minutes reading selections from the book and then another 10 minutes or so answering questions.

What's really interesting is that he considers himself to be pretty non-religious. He was raised jewish, though his family evidently didn't practice much. In college he studied British and American Literature and then went on to get a PhD in neuroscience (or something to that effect) and current conducts neuroscience work at Baylor College of Medicine. But, what's even more interesting, is that this book has won praise from hardcore members of both the atheists and the christian right.

He relayed a story about an interview he gave on NPR about the book, and the interviewer asked if he considered himself religious, to which he said no, he did not. So the interviewer pressed: "But you don't consider yourself an atheist, either, right?" and he agreed he did not. "So," the interviewer says, "you're an agnostic?" and David said: well, agnosticism says that there may be a god or the may not be a god, who knows? But why limit yourself to just those two choices? I believe in possibilities. I'm a possibilian.

Brilliant!

And, finally, CouchDB: The Definitive Guide talk, however, was a bit disappointing, largely because the panel description didn't really stress what the talk was going to be about. The Authors (and core developers of CouchDB) decided to spend 20-30 minutes talking about the process of writing a technical manual in an open community centric environment. I wanted to learn more about CouchDB. Their talk was interesting, but I still don't know much about CouchDB.

The rest of Sunday, however, was full of pure win. It started with a trip to the famed Austin BBQ smokehouse The Salt Lick. Mapquest, I'm guessing in an attempt to generate buzz around technically competent people with large social graphs, loaded 150 people up in buses, plied them with alcohol, and fed them some rather tasty BBQ meat. And, seriously, the BBQ at the Salt Lick is ridiculously good. The ribs were cooked absolutely perfectly. And their BBQ sauce is actually quite tasty, though I actually prefer Spokane's Longhorn BBQ sauce better, though I think the ribs were cooked better at The Salt Lick.

After the bus ride back (where they plied us with more free beer), Kevin and I stopped back at the hotel room to drop some stuff off and grab the rest of our evening supplies. First we headed over to Six for a google (blogger, really) party. It was lame. But we did pick up Connolly and Travis for our adventures. After that we split up: Kevin and Travis went to go listen to a band for an hour and Connolly and I went to The Cedar Door for the I-can-haz-cheeseburger party.

Best.

Party

Evar

So, we get there, and they stamp us to show that we belong there. The stamp said "WIN". I then joked that if they turned people away then they should have a stamp that said "FAIL." It turns out that they did have a stamp that said "FAIL" on it. Awesome. So Connolly and I each got a WIN and FAIL stamp.

There were glorious amounts of free cheeseburgers, which Connolly partook in, but I refrained from, in large part due to the 8 pounds of BBQ'ed meat that was still in my stomach. There were also drink tickets, though we never really got on that bandwagon. And then the swag came out. There were stuffed LOLcats being passed around, and a stuffed Walrus with a Bukkit (hooray!) and various silly books.

But the real party was the karaoke.

Now, I personally think karaoke is the most horrible experience ever. You're listening to someone sing (poorly and drunk) to a recorded song, trying to pretend that they're a rock star. But this karaoke was different. This karaoke was awesome. You see, this karaoke had a live band. Yes. A live band. And so, when you got up to sing your song and feel like a rock star there was a live fucking band behind you rocking out with you. And rock you did. You rocked hard. (though the dude who did "Enter Sandman" totally sucked. But everyone else was surprisingly good)

And, frankly, I'm impressed that the band knew 150 some odd songs.

Finally, Kevin and I hit PureVolume mostly because we could. It was stupid. We left.

Day 4 was largely spent recovering from Day 3, though I wasn't really hungover. I think it was just the combination of 3 days of rather full days plus a bed I'm not accustomed to + a bunch of meat + a night of parties... it just wore me out. So I slept in until about 11. I had decided that most of the panels today didn't interest me anyway and instead wanted to spend the afternoon wandering around Austin. Austin is actually a really neat little city. I think to see all of it you need a car, of course, but just downtown is a neat place to walk around. I took some pictures along the way.

Tonight I think we're going to take it relatively easy. Hannes is getting in around 9 so Kevin and I will hang out with him but I don't think we'll do anything too crazy. I need to check the schedule for tomorrow, but I think the conference is pretty much winding down so I think tomorrow will be a pretty mellow day all the way around. And then I leave Austin on Wednesday afternoon.