{"id":824,"date":"2009-03-12T02:43:29","date_gmt":"2009-03-12T07:43:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/?p=824"},"modified":"2009-03-12T02:43:29","modified_gmt":"2009-03-12T07:43:29","slug":"if-its-march-it-must-be-austin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/?p=824","title":{"rendered":"If it&#039;s March, it must be Austin."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yes, this is the annual, now almost ritualistic, pre-<a href=\"http:\/\/2009.sxsw.com\/interactive\">SXSW Interactive<\/a> post.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nAnd yes, much of the pre-SXSW preparation has been the same, but everything feels a little different, a little off this year &#8211; in no small part because of the preamble.  See, most years, I&#8217;ve had a weekend trip to DC (usually by car or rail) the weekend before SXSW begins, but I spend most of the week leading up to the conference in the office.  This year, though&#8230;well, you be the judge:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Thursday, 3\/5: Fly from Newark to San Francisco<\/li>\n<li>Thursday, 3\/5 &#8211; Sunday, 3\/9: Review committee meeting at Google in Mountain View<\/li>\n<li>Sunday, 3\/9: Drive to Sacramento<\/li>\n<li>Monday, 3\/10: Review committee meeting in Sacramento office<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>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 &#8211;  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.<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8211; 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 &#8211; 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.<\/p>\n<p>The hours haven&#8217;t been working in my favor either.  And for once, I&#8217;m not talking about the time difference, or the switch to daylight savings.  I worked about 43 hours in three days &#8211; 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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t occur to me that my Bay Area friends would be in the middle of THEIR mad dash to pack for Austin.  D&#8217;oh.<\/p>\n<p>Thankfully, I&#8217;ve managed to make a mostly-clean break from the office &#8211; the work that absolutely had to get done has been done (for the most part&#8230; *ahem*) &#8211; and I&#8217;m officially off-the-grid as far as the world of scholarship administration is concerned.<\/p>\n<p>And with all that out of the way, I can turn my attention to the following pressing concerns:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Some of the best people you could ever know<\/li>\n<li>Shiner Bock<\/li>\n<li>Fascinating conversation<\/li>\n<li>Shiner Bock<\/li>\n<li>Genuine nerd fun<\/li>\n<li>Shiner Bock<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If you&#8217;re going to SXSW, I&#8217;m looking forward to seeing you &#8211; even if I&#8217;ve never seen you before.  (Don&#8217;t try to work out that logic &#8211; your brain may explode.)  I&#8217;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&#8217;ll be attending by clicking the sidebar link (or by clicking <a href=\"http:\/\/sxsw2009.sched.org\/critic\">here<\/a>).  You can also get the lowdown on all things SXSW over at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sxswbaby.com\/index.php\">Baby<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>A quick aside &#8211; if you&#8217;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&#8217;t be at SXSW, or could care less about SXSW, I apologize in advance &#8211; come back in a week or so, and I&#8217;ll be back to ranting about pop culture, or politics, or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/?p=709\">IKEA furniture instructions<\/a>, or whatever the hell is bouncing around in my cranium.<\/p>\n<p>Next stop, Austin!  Yee-HAW!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yes, this is the annual, now almost ritualistic, pre-SXSW Interactive post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[23,24,26],"tags":[63,64,66],"class_list":["post-824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sxsw","category-travel","category-work","tag-sxsw","tag-travel","tag-work"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hxip-di","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}