After several clumsy attempts to import posts from the old platform, followed by the process of making sure there wasn’t anything too incriminating that I didn’t remember writing back in 2007, I can now say that the blog is up and running once again.
Except for internal links. Those won’t work. Too bad,’ because I’m not re-editing anything else.
In honor of the blog finding new life, here’s a GIF of Kate Upton dancing in a bikini:
It sounds like something out of a movie or a cheesy Google commercial, if they ran commercials for Google Earth. From Yahoo! News, the story of a boy from India who found his family after 25 years using Google Earth:
Saroo Brierley was only 5 when a train zoomed him hundreds of miles from home. It took 25 years and a technological revolution for him to get back
An Indian man separated from his family for 25 years has defied the odds by tracking them down — using little more than a vague recollection of his childhood and some help from Google Earth’s mapping technology.
In short, when he was 5 years old in 1987, he and his brother boarded the wrong train, thinking they were going home. They fell asleep on the train, and when they woke up, they were on the wrong side of the country, with no money. Also, he was only 5.
A tragic saga ensued. His brother died, and he was eventually declared a lost child and adopted by a family who took him to Tasmania. Tasmania is very, very far away from India.
Finally, using Google Earth and vague memories of childhood, he began searching the area around the train station until he found his hometown, Ganesh Talai. Using Facebook, he corresponded with some people from the town, and went to India and pounded pavement until he found them.
He says he plans on making a movie about the experience. I’d watch it.
Photo credit: Tasmania.A2005320.2355.250m by Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC[see page for license], via Wikimedia Commons.
My assessments of the music at South by Southwest this year have been unremittingly critical, and I figured out why. For various reasons, we have been looking for specific events with bands we know well. This is great, but the spirit of SXSW has always been discovery: wandering around downtown, or any number of other parts of Austin, to just see who’s playing. I have on occasion made some great discoveries. This year, though, we are keeping it relatively simple. I hereby commit, in front of whomever might be reading this, that next year I will take in some unknown bands and then say at least a few nice things about them.
Back to tonight: After an attempt to hear the Cult play the Waterloo Records parking lot (you really can’t hear them from across Lamar while a band is playing on the Whole Foods patio, although it creates a fascinatingly jarring stereo effect), we made our way back to Auditorium Shores for Counting Crows.
Let me first say that “August & Everything After” was my theme music for part of the mid-90’s, and Adam Duritz is one of my heroes among singers. I had high hopes for the show, and those hopes were fully realized when they played “Rain King.” Unfortunately, that was the last pre-encore song of a roughly 90-minute set. There are two terms I’m trying to remember, but Google isn’t helping:
I saw R.E.M. play a show in Houston in 1995, and while they put on a phenomenal show, they clearly could not remember the lyrics to several of their most famous songs. No one really knows all the words to “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” except hopefully the people who wrote it. When Billy Joel played in Houston around the same time, it was clear no one cared what he had released recently. We just wanted “Piano Man.”
Tonight, it felt as though we waited politely through about an hour of new material for them to play “Mr. Jones.” The musicians were incredible, but Adam Duritz was not displaying the energy that always made them such a great band. He mentioned that he had been partying all week (and that’s partly what SXSW is for), so perhaps he was just dragging a bit. Still, I sensed that they are tired of playing their old stuff. Okay, enough negativity. Here’s the song that had me so excited:
[Cue the grumpy old man rant…]
Today was a less-than-satisfying attempt to venture into the music side of South by Southwest. The plan, hatched several days ago, was to catch the Shins’ free show at Auditorium Shores at 8:00, then head to the gutted remains of Spaghetti Warehouse at 10:00 to see Girl Talk.
A note on Girl Talk and the overall trend of making people jump through hoops in order to get to see shows. Maybe offering vague hints of a show’s location (or even very existence) is an effective way to generate buzz and get some people to wander downtown Austin and/or the internet doing whatever it takes to get to the show, but that ain’t me. Maybe I’m just grumpy and old, but I prefer to look up a show’s date and time, purchase a ticket if necessary, and go to an entrance of some sort in order to enter a venue and watch a show. That’s how most of the world works, but SXSW sometimes does it different.
But I’ll get back to that.
This was the best picture I could get of the Shins from the spot where we could actually hear them, alas.
As for the Shins, they’re a pretty good band. I get them confused with the Strokes for two reasons: (1) their names are both “The ***” names beginning with “S” and (2) I am out of touch with music. The main observation I can make about the show is that the stage, set up against the backdrop of Lady Bird Lake and downtown Austin, reminded me of the Austin City Limits studio stage, except that this backdrop was real. We wandered the park in search of a good spot to both see and hear the show, eventually concluding that there was no available spot where we could do both. The best sound, in my opinion, was actually on the walkway of the 1st Street bridge, where we couldn’t see anything.
Anyway, the Girl Talk show was part of a Nike/VEVO event promoting a new doodad that Nike rolled out this week. Getting on the RSVP list involved tweeting something to VEVO and getting a password to a website. They never got back to me with the password, but then someone tweeted the password and it showed up on Facebook. The line to get into the former Spaghetti Warehouse was long–not as long as some lines I’ve seen, but pretty damn long. A volunteer told us that the venue only holds 500 people, that there were 100 VIP’s that would get in no matter what, and that over 7,000 people had RSVP’d. Another volunteer told us that if we did not receive an e-mail in response to our RSVP with the subject line “Awesomeness,” then we were not on the list.
Guess who didn’t get such an e-mail?
Seriously, it would have been easier to get into a Where’s Fluffy? show, and they’re not even a real band.
At any rate, I didn’t really want to support Nike anyway, because of reasons.
That left us wandering downtown Austin with no wristbands and no particular idea of what else was going on, and then my phone battery died because I left the camera feature running for too long. Nothing seemed to be going on outdoors, so we went home.
I remember Thursday night of last year’s SXSW being much more active, in terms of people being out and music going on in accessible places. Last year, the Thursday of SXSW week was St. Patrick’s Day, which I’m sure had much to do with the activity. This year, it just seemed like nearly everything was behind one barrier to access or another, except for Auditorium Shores. Again, though, maybe I’m just getting older and grumpier.
Photo credit: Yeah, I took that first picture, but I don’t really want to admit it; Where’s Fulffy? by mr-tee on redbubble.
His newly-developed policy on accepting paid posts to his blog is one for the ages:
1. We will accept a paid post from you.
2. The payment shall be in the form of a pony.
3. The prettiness and awesomeness of the pony shall be in direct proportion to the tediousness, banality, and sub-literacy of your guest post. If your post is quite good, you can pay us with any pony, even the sort of tired, dead-eyed pony you can steal from a child’s party in a suburb where the home foreclosure rate exceeds 50%. But for each cliche, null-content sentence, questionable segue, or instance of meaningless drivel appearing in the post, the pony must grow steadily more pretty, to the theoretical point where the pony is so pretty that it causes a quantum pony-cuteness singularity. For each spelling or grammatical error in your post, the pony must be one step more awesome, in the sense of “terrifying.” If you ever use an apostrophe before an “s” in a word that is plural, not possessive, the pony must possess the ability to breathe fire a minimum distance of twenty (20) feet.
4. The pony must be real, not pretend.
5. No Shetlands. Are you kidding me?
6. Also, hay. For the pony. And, frankly, it wouldn’t hurt us to lay some down for Clark.
I salute you, good sir. I wish I had but a fraction of your power.
Photo credit: Pony on the shore, New Forest, © Copyright Jim Champion and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence
My SXSWi experienced has left me feeling inspired, intrigued, excited, energized, and…..utterly, entirely unmotivated.
Perhaps not surprisingly, spending several days talking to interesting people about interesting concepts and innovations is far more exciting than sitting in a home office and actually doing the stuff we talked about.
The Interactive conference is over. I am catastrophically behind on work. Therefore, I did not do anything remotely SXSW-related today. Aside from writing this and a few other blog posts, I mean. I didn’t even leave the house except to go pick up my dog from the boarding place (she was very happy to see me!)
To the awesome folks I met over the past few days, I’ll get around to e-mailing you at some point, really. Hopefully you’ll be around next year, and so will I.
From Omar Gallaga at Austin360, we learn of the explosive growth of South by Southwest Interactive. This year, there were 24,569 paid registrations, a 27% increase from last year’s total of 19,364.
In 2010, there were 14,251 paid registrations. In two years, that’s an increase of 10,318 people, or 72%. Assuming my math is correct, and it probably isn’t. Most of the pre-SXSW articles I read used the number 15,000 to describe how many attendees to expect. I have no idea if all 24,569 people actually showed up, but there were certainly many, many, many people there.
In case you are wondering, this is more people than the total population of Alvin (pop. 24,236) and San Benito (pop. 24,250), Texas; and slightly fewer than Paris (pop. 25,171) and Seguin (pop. 25,175).
We rule.
Photo credit: n.a.s.a.-sxsw-2009-779328 by lullabyes.
Nothing remotely related to SXSW was going on in the building today
I began the last day of the Interactive festival in just the way that anyone trying to leave their law career behind would like to begin it. By going to court.
I also had a rather inauspicious beginning to the day due to an unfortunate goof. Since I spent the weekend at a sleepover of sorts, I had not had an opportunity to “spring forward” with any of the clocks at home. When I got home last night, tired from a day of learning and growing as a person, the time change of the previous day was the farthest thing from my mind.
When my alarm clock went off at 7:00 a.m., affording me a whole two hours to wake up, shower, remember how to tie a tie, and get my butt to the courthouse, I did not realize it was actually 8:00 a.m. For once, I’m glad I have this compulsive need to wake up earlier than is strictly necessary. Rather than make it to the courthouse with around 30 minutes to spare. I arrived with around 3 extra minutes. The simple fact that I arrived on time should be cause for a damn parade, but I still don’t see any bunting.
Miraculously, I was in an out of court in record time, arriving at just short of 9:15 a.m. and adjourning just after 9:30. With the catastrophic traffic, I was parking near the Convention Center by about 10:15, and comically changing clothes in the car. Luckily, no one walked by to see the show.
Since I had just been reminded that I am a lawyer…
I got in just in time for a CLE presentation, which I decided I should attend because hey! CLE credit!
I went to two CLE sessions, which I will delve into on my law blog:
Back to the Lounge!!!
I could tell I was burning out on panels, almost for good, as I fled the CLE room ahead of a panel on something like “Maximizing Revenues from Film.” You would think I could want to hear that, but I felt like just talking to people.
Once again, the bloggers’ lounge proved to be a great place to get free food and meet people. I met a fellow legal ghost-blogger. An interesting band called the Sweetness played, and then they kicked us out at 4:00 p.m., a couple hours earlier than on previous days.
SXSW NSFW
To cap off the conference, I headed with a friend to a session at the Sheraton Hotel. Thus involved a rather comical search for a Car2Go and a ponderous drive through absurd amounts of traffic. Our destination? A session titled “This Talk Is NSFW: Nudity and Online Journalism.” Thanks to traffic, we missed the first half, and I’m not sure I ever quite picked up the thread of the discussion.
As we walked in, the speaker, Keith Plocek, the Director of Web Content and Traffic at Village Voice Media, was showing slides of people in various states of undress and asking people to vote on whether they thought the image was “NSFW.” The issue was when a newspaper or other news source should tag an article or picture as NSFW. The general rule relates to context, but it can also be quite political. Whether or not to tag a picture, he said, largely depends on who is being sexy in the picture. Pictures that seem “gay” are much more likely to get tagged. Using the NSFW tag is a great way to get traffic, but it will get you angry comments if it’s too tame. You don’t want to deceive your readers about this issue, silly as it may seem, because that erodes your overall credibility.
He also talked about the importance of “covering” events as opposed to “pandering.” “Pandering” would be putting a naked woman somewhere and taking pictures, as opposed to covering a porn convention already in progress. He showed photos of the World Naked Bike Ride in Los Angeles from a few years ago. He said the page got about 800,000 views when they posted it, and then it leveled off. The page got even more hits the following year, in anticipation of the next ride, and now it’s up to about 2.5 million hits. Obviously, the NSFW tag gets attention.
They have to make some editorial decisions about what to cover, though, so they don’t over-use the tag. For example, they cannot cover every burlesque event in the city.
One question from the audience was about violent content. The NSFW can be used for violent content as well as sexual content. Apparently there is another tag, NSFL (“not safe for life” or “not safe for lunch”), used for particularly disturbing violent content. People tend to have certain expectations when they click on a link tagged “NSFW,” i.e. boobs. Don’t show them something really gross if they are expecting boobs.
And that’s all she wrote…
I wanted to go to the party thrown by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but by the time I got home, I knew that is where I’d be staying.
Tomorrow, I catch up on work.
Thursday, music…
It think it is fair to say that my iPad case has been one of the breakway stars of South by Southwest Interactive 2012. At least six people have approached me asking if they can take a picture of the case, and not a single one of them has asked me to pose with the case. I guess that shows you who, between me and the case, is the photogenic one.
For those who have not experienced the wonder of the case, it makes the iPad look like an Etch-A-Sketch. You know you want some of this.
Thanks to Amazon, such a fly case can be yours, too. You can also get it directly from Headcase. Well, you can do this if you think you could handle this much concentrated awesome. Can you?
