The conference is a bit of a different animal this year. For one, it’s a LOT larger than its ever been. I know I’ve said that before, but this year’s growth is just insane. The conference now spans three hotels in addition to the Austin Convention Center. The lovely young woman manning the registration booth told me on Thursday that the registrations have doubled from 2009, which means we’re talking in the neighborhood of 8,000-10,000 attendees. Lines for parties are now wrapping themselves around whole city blocks. I’m thrilled for the success of the conference, but I miss the more intimate feel from when I first started attending. So many unfamiliar faces. The introvert in me wants to hide under a large rock.

Of course, this year’s conference is also remarkable, at least for me, for the people who aren’t here: Esin & Jessa, Kevin Lawver, Anitra Pavka, and of course, The Brad. In many ways things feel…just sort of off without them here.

On the upside, I’m 5/5 on my panel selections so far, but with so many panels on this year’s schedule, I’m bound to hit a clunker eventually.

As they say in the news, more updates as the news warrants…

Team Conan FTW.

Leno must go-go and make room for CoCo.

Seriously, tho. Jay? You’ve had a good run. You made a commitment to hand the show over in 2009. You weaseled your way back onto TV by preying on NBC’s weak schedule and/or bottom line. The 10pm experiment didn’t work. It’s time to go.

You don’t need the money. That car collection I saw on the series 12 finale of Top Gear proves that. (Your garage is bigger than my apartment…building.) You don’t need the work – I’m sure your agent could line you up with 300 nights a year in Vegas for twice what NBC’s paying you. What do you have to gain here, other than destroying a venerable late-night franchise?

Conan called your bluff with his statement from earlier today. You can’t win this one. Walk away. Just…walk away.

Go Team Conan.

Brad L. Graham at Fray Cafe 9 (SXSW 2009)

This isn’t what I thought I’d be writing about tonight. This is about the furthest thing from what I thought I’d be writing tonight.

I had planned to write about the end of the Russell T. Davies/David Tennant era of Doctor Who – specifically the two-finale, The End of Time. Then I saw this…

…and it felt like I’d been sucker-punched.

A bit of background – in 2005, I attended South By Southwest Interactive for the first time. I knew practically no one. And the ones I did know (save for a certain Jersey refugee and his wife), I didn’t know very well. I was stepping WAY out of my comfort zone – so much so that I didn’t sleep the night before traveling, and thought, albeit briefly, abut calling the whole trip off.

Brad Graham wasn’t the first person I met in Austin that year – that distinction went to Kristin – but it was Brad, through his annual “Break Bread…” opening night soirée, that I met so many of the people with whom I would spend the following 4 days and remain in contact with over the following five years; in no small way, he helped build the SXSWi family. And in that time, we bonded over our shared obsessions – theater, web geekery, Doctor Who – and I’d felt like I’d found something of a kindred spirit.

Brad passed away sometime over the long New Year’s weekend. He was 41 years old. I think James may have said it best: “The glue of SXSW for the past decade is gone.” And I never got a chance to thank him for welcoming me, with open arms and a cold beer, into that amazing family.

I’m not going to pretend that I knew him as well as the folks who were with him at that first SXSWi 11 years ago, but that doesn’t make his death hurt any less. I knew him well enough to know that he was a sweet, funny, passionate man. He had no shame (I mean that in the best way possible), and heaven knows he never missed an opportunity for an ribald comment…and that’s one of the reasons why we loved him.

I’m not sure I can write much more right now, and to be honest I’m not sure if what I’ve already written will make much sense unless you’ve taken up residence in my head. I will get around to that Doctor Who post soon – I think Brad would have liked that – but somehow I think it’s only appropriate to let Brad have the last word.

From Fray Cafe 9 at SXSW 2009, I give you the story of Brad’s ‘second time’.

Thank you, Brad. Godspeed, you magnificent bastard.

Edit (2:50AM) – there’s a memorial page (of a sort) up on Metafilter.

For the last 6 months or so, I’ve been getting BusinessWeek, mostly because I had to burn off some airline mileage (and I was already getting the now-defunct Conde Nast Portfolio). Leafing through today’s issue, I couldn’t figure out why my brain wouldn’t let me move past this advert:

Looks normal enough, right?

It’s a Verizon Wireless ad for the Blackberry Tour. Looks innocent enough, but something just seemed off, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I tried moving past it and reading the rest of the issue, but I kept flipping back to the ad. I reread the ad copy – seemed like the normal VZW sales pitch. Then I looked closer at the simulated screen image.

Things come into focus. (-ish.)

The simulated user appears to be using GPS to find his way around Rome, Italy. On “America’s Largest and Most Reliable 3G Network”. That seems…odd. Rome, GA? Sure. Rome, Italy? Not so much. Still, it’s possible that a VZW user could be navigating abroad – in fact, a look at the Blackberry Tour’s product page reveals that it is, in fact, a “world phone” – meaning that it uses a CDMA 1X EVDO radio for 3G in North America, but switches to a GSM or UMTS radio when outside North America, where VZW doesn’t exist except as a line-item on Vodafone’s balance sheet. Still, something seemed wrong. So I looked even closer.

EVD'OH!

And there it was. Itty-bitty white-on-green type, barely visible. Surely the average BusinessWeek reader would miss it. It’s the sort of thing that only a self-confessed geek who spends too much time reading gadget blogs (and used to be an regular at WirelessAdvisor.com) would spot.

“1XEV”. Or, in technical terms, CDMA 1X EVDO Rev. A. In essence, the phone is saying “I’m on a mobile phone network that has never existed in the part of Europe for which I’m currently displaying navigation data.” Because there are no CDMA networks in Italy, EVDO or otherwise. Running a CDMA phone in an all-GSM/UMTS country is like trying to fit an American plug into a British socket – it just won’t go.

So, in essence, Verizon Wireless is suggesting that this phone:

• can pull in a wireless signal from thousands of miles away to allow use of data services on other continents (at great expense to the user, no doubt), or
• is bollocks, can’t navigate for crap, and might try to route you past the Colosseum on your way to work.

Either way, it’s a FAIL, albeit one almost nobody will notice.

Game Theory

• Intimate dinners trump massive parties with thousands of strangers, without question
• Kathy Sierra is a freakin’ genius (actually, I already knew that, but I thought I’d mention it anyway)
• Twitter is still the social networking king, at least amongst the SXSW hive mind, although some new applications like FourSquare crashed the party with some serious potential
• The conference is HUGE now. As in ‘over 9,000 registrants’ huge. It’s more than a bit overwhelming. (I’ll expand on this point in a later post)
• I really need to read Designing the Obvious
• I need more exciting shit to happen to me in the next 11 months so I have a good story to tell next year at Fray Cafe
• Put simply, I have amazing, astounding, wonderful friends who I don’t see anywhere near often enough

I’m currently at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, waiting on the flight home that ends this marathon of travel. The flight has been thrice-delayed, as though someone or something doesn’t want me to sleep in my own bed anytime soon. With luck, I’ll be home tonight, and it’ll be back to reality tomorrow.

*sigh*

• Thursday, 3/5: Fly from Newark to San Francisco
• Thursday, 3/5 – Sunday, 3/9: Review committee meeting at Google in Mountain View
• Sunday, 3/9: Drive to Sacramento
• Monday, 3/10: Review committee meeting in Sacramento office

Notice the difference? It tallies to the tune of about 3,000 miles. It was, at this point in the itinerary, that I was presented with a choice – prior to flying out to Austin on Thursday, I could fly home for a grand total of one day, in which I would have no time to do much of anything, or stay in California and work out of the Concord office for two complete days. Using a complex decision engine (by which I mean I determined which option would be less expensive for my company and excluding my personal well-being and/or sanity), I opted to stay on the left coast and fly to Austin from San Francisco.

The added seven days away from home presented a new set of logistics issues, primarily having to do with packing and laundry. Largely, things have worked out – I shipped my warmer weather gear to myself in Concord before I left NJ (27lbs outbound), and earlier today I shipped most of my cooler-weather gear, along with my suit and dress shoes, back to NJ (40lbs outbound – why is dirty laundry always heavier?). I had a minor scare when I noticed that the box had a big gash down one of the corners, but a quick inventory reveals only a pair of socks absent. I can live with that.

The hours haven’t been working in my favor either. And for once, I’m not talking about the time difference, or the switch to daylight savings. I worked about 43 hours in three days – which would explain why I ended up locking myself in my Sacramento hotel room and crashing on Sunday. Trying to get back to a normal routine after that, even for a couple of days, has been challenging.

There was also the somewhat selfish aspect of the extended trip, which was to see some of my Bay Area friends in their native environments. Unfortunately, it didn’t occur to me that my Bay Area friends would be in the middle of THEIR mad dash to pack for Austin. D’oh.

Thankfully, I’ve managed to make a mostly-clean break from the office – the work that absolutely had to get done has been done (for the most part… *ahem*) – and I’m officially off-the-grid as far as the world of scholarship administration is concerned.

And with all that out of the way, I can turn my attention to the following pressing concerns:

• Some of the best people you could ever know
• Shiner Bock
• Fascinating conversation
• Shiner Bock
• Genuine nerd fun
• Shiner Bock

If you’re going to SXSW, I’m looking forward to seeing you – even if I’ve never seen you before. (Don’t try to work out that logic – your brain may explode.) I’ll be updating this space over the next week with my exploits, hopefully with photographic or video evidence of the geek finery. You can also check out which panels (and, yes, parties) I’ll be attending by clicking the sidebar link (or by clicking here). You can also get the lowdown on all things SXSW over at the Baby.

A quick aside – if you’re following me on the various social networkamajigs, most of my updates over the next week will be SXSW-related in some way. If you won’t be at SXSW, or could care less about SXSW, I apologize in advance – come back in a week or so, and I’ll be back to ranting about pop culture, or politics, or IKEA furniture instructions, or whatever the hell is bouncing around in my cranium.

Next stop, Austin! Yee-HAW!

The pain begins after the jump.

re-view: “Dreamcatcher” [0*]
Originally posted March 23, 2003

Hear me, America! Shit-weasel fungus will destroy the human race! Welcome to the bizzaro world of “Dreamcatcher”, where not only do aliens exist, but apparently they’ve been trying to destroy us for the last 25 years.

This was a film so astoundingly bad, even I could barely stand it.

Let me see if I can break this crap-tastic film down for you. There are these four friends, see. They all grew up in a idyllic Stephen King childhood in Derry, Maine. Then, in a quest to see a picture of the homecoming queen’s cootch, they happen to interrupt some high-profile bullies laying the smackdown on a mildly-disabled Scooby Doo fanatic named Douglas Cavell – but thanks to his inability to speak random letters, he comes to be known as “Duddits”. The five form their own Scooby gang, randomly trying to solve local mysteries. To aid their cause, Duddits imbues the boys with telepathic powers – and gives one the ability to find lost shit at great distance.

Still with me?

Anyway, fast forward 20 or so years, and all four friends are feeling somewhat off. Psychiatrist Henry (Thomas Jane) is reading the mind of his gigantic patient in an effort to get him to stop eating himself to death…when he’s not putting a gun to his head. Car salesman Pete (Timothy Olyphant) cons women into having dinner with him by reading their minds and…finding lost shit at moderate distance. College professor “Jonesy” (Damian Lewis) telepathically catches cheaters in his class and lets them go…and then walks into traffic and gets hit by a car. And as for Joe (Jason Lee), better known as “Beaver”…well, the less said the better. Anyway, they the four use the excuse of Jonesy’s crippling to convene at their getaway cabin in Conveniently Isolated, ME for their annual excuse to drink, hunt, and talk about Duddits.

Meanwhile, in a completely different movie, Colonel Curtis (Morgan Freeman) of “Blue Boy” squad sets up a makeshift Army base at the local general store. See, the entire area of Conveniently Isolated, ME is under quarantine because of an alien crash landing. These aliens not only have the ability to take any form and invade your brain with their thoughts, but they also spread a fungus which, if allowed to spread, creates giant alien worms (lovingly referred to as “shit-weasels” by Freeman) that eat peoples faces and pass the fungus on to other living things, creating more shit-weasels that destroy their host and exit out the hinder. It seems that “Blue Boy” (an elite squad who make the regular Army look “like pussies”) has been fighting this alien threat, covertly and quietly by blowing crap up with helicopters, for the better part of a quarter-century. Curtis, slightly insane in a “Heart of Darkness” kind of way, is grooming his second-in-command, Owen (Tom Sizemore) to take over as head of the MiB wannabes. (They even pull out the “one day from retirement” cliché. What’s more, as a corny “passing-the-torch” moment, Curtis hands over to Owen a gun given to him by that great military leader, John Wayne.) But Owen is in conflict over the methods of his superior, and isn’t sure blowing stuff up randomly isn’t the right way to fight the alien menace.

Anyway (can you believe I’m still recapping the plot?), over a course of events that actually make me nostalgic for “Manos, The Hands of Fate”, Beaver gets eaten by a shit-weasel, Jonesy gets taken over by an alien who eats people and speaks in a bad British accent, Pete NEARLY gets eaten by a shit-weasel and gets taken captive by Alien Jones, and Henry…gets captured by Blue Boy, and gets placed behind an electric fence. Hooray for our protagonists! That about covers the first 90 or so hours of the film – what follows is a tale of revenge and inept storytelling that somehow results in Duddits (played as an adult by Marky Mark’s brother, Donnie Wahlberg) saving the world. You only get one guess as to how.

I’m honestly not sure what’s worse – the fact that this schlock of a story is based on a book by Stephen King, or the fact that the screenplay was written by William Goldman (“The Princess Bride”) and Lawrence Kasdan (“The Empire Strikes Back”). There’s just no other way to say it. This was a terrible story, a terrible screenplay, with terrible direction (Kasdan again). This was supposed to be, at heart, a scary, suspenseful movie – except that everything was handled with such a heavy hand that you could see EVERY “plot twist” coming from a mile away. Roger Corman may not have been the greatest filmmaker in the world, but the man knew how to execute a plot twist. (Sure, they didn’t always make sense, but you never saw them coming.) Kasdan, who gave us perhaps one of the greatest plot twists in the last 20 years (“Luke, I am your father, ” anyone?) should have been able to do 100 times better than he did here.

What’s more, I’m astounded gay activists haven’t pounced on this film. Why? Here’s why. “Mr. Gay”. Duddits, who – as you’ll recall – can’t pronounce words correctly, refers to the evil alien who takes over Jonesy’s body as “Mr. Gray”. Except that he can’t pronounce the “R”. So, the main antagonist – the primary evil in the film (aside from Morgan Freeman’s acting), is known as “Mr. GAY”. Take that as you will.

Given the material, you can’t really blame the actors for their performances in this piece of tripe on film. Jason Lee simply stands around a drinks beer for the better part of 40 minutes and spouts silly curses like “Bite my bag, Betty” and “fuck me, Freddy”. Olyphant is “the funny drunk”. Jane is the brooding sad-sack. And Lewis chews vast quantities of scenery as British Alien Mr. Gay Jonesy AND tortured “normal” Jonesy held captive by Mr. Gay within his “memory warehouse”. (Don’t ask. I beg you.) Morgan Freeman is in full Colonel Kurtz mode, shooting off the hands of his subordinates who (shouted) “cross the Curtis line!” Sizemore has this perplexed look on his face, as though he’s wondering what the hell he’s doing in this steaming pile of movie.

The long and short is this: Do not spend $8 on “Dreamcatcher”. Do not rent “Dreamcatcher”. Do not watch “Dreamcatcher” if it’s ever on HBO. If someone on the street offers you “Dreamcatcher”, shoot them and burn their body. If you are on an airplane and your only options are “Dreamcatcher” and jumping to an untimely death, I hope you’ve lived a life without regret.

You know what else makes me sad? The current state of SNL. Save for the brilliant stunt-casting of Tina Fey as Sarah Palin earlier this season, SNL hasn’t given me any reason to watch on a weekly basis since…well, since Tina Fey stopped doing Weekend Update. (Noticing a theme here?) So imagine my surprise when this sketch came to my attention earlier today.

Not only is it funny, but it touches on what are, in my opinion, big problems with the state of Broadway and the American musical theater in general. That, and NPH is teh awesome.

Holy crap.

Of course Stephen Colbert was right when referred to Rod Blagojevich as a “Lego Man” on tonight’s Colbert Report. The photographic proof is right there – hell, even the side parting is the same! I’m just embarrassed that it took me this long to notice it.