SW
By anders pearson 20 Mar 2005
i’ve spent the entire day catching up on email and RSS feeds after my trip to austin and tucson last week.
austin to see lani and for the yearly pilgrimage to SXSW to eat, drink, and geek out with the web elite. i reconnected with most of the people i met last year and met many more new people too. i know i met at least 58 people.
i had planned on printing out a whole mess of mfr stickers to hand out to people and generally coat austin with, but i was too much of a slacker to get that done in time. so the night before i left new york i got a bunch of colored 3x5 index cards, some fresh sharpie markers, and drew a bunch of robots. like this guy. about 20 different robot designs, repeating some on different colored cards. 60 cards in all. on the back i put my contact info. like business cards but much more personal and much cooler. everytime i met someone i gave them a robot (when i remembered at least). after the conference, i had 2 robots left. hence, i met at least 58 people.
all in all a good conference. no house fires this year, so i think that makes it pretty successful.
while i was in austin, my parents were in tucson visiting my grandparents and uncle, so i decided to head over there for a few days too since i was in the neighborhood. i haven’t been to tucson since i was in 5th grade and i hadn’t seen the arizona branch of my extended family for quite a few years, so that was good to get in. at SXSW, Molly found out that i was going to be in tucson, where she lives, and insisted that we meet up for dinner. so on thursday night (St. Patrick’s day apparently), my parents and i had some margaritas and grub with her. Molly’s always fun and my parents had been spending a lot of time cooped up in the RV park where my grandparents live so i think they really enjoyed having someone new to talk to for a bit.
the rest of my time in tucson was spent visiting the relatives, seeing various sights, and soaking in the warm weather.
getting back to new york yesterday was the real nightmare of the trip. i’d planned things so that i’d be getting into laguardia at 11pm which, taking the m60 bus, would have me back in my apartment by midnight. my flight from tucson to dallas was delayed long enough that i missed my connection to laguardia. the only other flight to LGA that night was solidly overbooked so they offered me a choice of a later flight to Newark, or a flight to LGA early the next morning. this was possibly the worst choice i’ve ever been offered. worse than the last election. arriving in Newark in the middle of the night or spending a night in Dallas? well, when it comes down to it, Newark is the lesser of those two evils so off i went. we landed in NJ around 12:30. the airport shuttle was running slow so i couldn’t get to the NJ Transit terminal in time to catch the 12:44 or 12:56 trains into manhattan. had to wait for the 1:30. all in all, i finally made it back to my apartment around 2:30. i’m fairly used to that kind of thing flying standby all the time, but this time, i was worried about all the spring break kids making it hard to get anywhere standby so i actually paid a bunch of money for a real ticket. so color me extra annoyed.
two days in the city, and i’ll be off to DC for pycon. then, maybe, some rest.