Meryl's Notes Blog

I spent more time in Dallas Love Field Airport than I did flying to Austin, but I’ll take that over a car drive any day. The plane arrived only 45 minutes late. After getting the bags, I looked up Nick’s flight and saw it was late, so I stuck around. Checking again, it was delayed another hour. OK, no problem. No rush. The suitcases and I got comfy in the baggage claim area until two different women sat next to me wearing half a bottle of perfume… each. I got deeply immersed in playing Alchemy on my PDA to pass the time. When it got close to 3:30 PM, I checked on plane again… uh oh. Delayed another hour and he had not left Dallas yet. I decided to head to the hotel.

Fast forward to 7:00 PM, Nick and I finally caught up with each other in the lobby of the hotel. We eventually made our way to Break Bread with Brad at the Iron Cactus. Immediately, we found Thomas and the rest of the crew.

The crew: Jay, Jish, Ben and Mena of MovableType, Andre (FilePile), Mike, Mike, Dinah, Rebecca, JJG, Wes Felter, Leia, Matt, Mark, Kevin and too many more to remember. Mucho apologies to those I have omitted.

Then the best part… Christine! She and I found each other right away and it didn’t seem like we were meeting in person for the first time. Way cool.

After filling ourselves with tasty Tex-Mex food and cold beverages, we went to Polly Esthers for a Karaoke where I had the pleasure of watching Jish and Brad sing, "I Got You Babe” and Mena’s adorable “Stand By Your Man.” Being the exhausted wimp that I am, my leaving earlier than Christine made me miss Ernie singing "Oops, I Did it Again."

Next day, the real first day of sxsw started with Kick at Auditorium Shores. Anil is responsible for our making ourselves look silly playing kickball. A little action always does good… no worries about what to say to a person you meet for the first time. Just good ol’ fashioned fun like when we were kids. Competitive spirit came out in me and I was pissed that someone caught both of my nice kicks.

But it was cool being there and meeting Cam, where I got my Camworld t-shirt along with a Kuro5hin Media Whore shirt. The goodies bag didn’t have much, so these were gems. What was in the goodies bag? Papers mostly, three packages of mint Skittles (ooooh) and a plastic CD case. Yep, that’s it. Christine did get a guitar key chain that I missed. That’s OK, I got my shirts.

Finally, we join our first official sxsw event - the end of Lawrence Lessig’s presentation. He was signing his book, The Future of Ideas, so I bought one and got his John Hancock.

In between sessions, I had the honor of meeting Steven, Heather, and Dori. It was a blast having Dori sitting with us because she typed notes on her (I WANT ONE!) MAC PowerBookG4 and we had a conversation through the laptop so as not to be rude to interrupt the presentation. It was nice not having to sit there counting the tiles on the ceiling.

Rarely, do I get to enjoy panels (no fault of the speaker, of course), but I got a kick out of the 37signals.com presentation with Jason Fried and Ernie Kim. They put on a game show the demonstrate Simplicity in the Web without any boring lectures. Excellent, dudes!

Christine and I headed back to our room for a little rest. We were going to go to the opening party, but it was far west and I needed to be someplace far east for a small dinner gathering. Unfortunately, the restaurant couldn’t seat us until very late and it took awhile to finish dinner

Also met Powazek, Carrie, Zeldman, Michael, Chris, Veen, Josh, June, Paco, and Mark.

We headed back to the west side for Nick’s party. I was so eager to get to it… unluckily, they left before we got there. There were a few people there that we met including Billy, Jessica, and Cheri. We talked with them for a little while before heading back into the dreaded chilly wind.

As sorry as I am about my original roomie not making it here (I am thinking of you), it’s worked out marvelously with Christine. She is such fun and has really made me laugh a lot more than I have in recent months. It’s amazing how she puts up with my clinging onto her when I am lost in confusing world of communications.