Sunday, March 15, 2009

SxSWi, SxSWf and Barcamp Austin IV - Saturday

Although I'm taking in the whole SxSW experience this year (Interactive, Film and Music), I punted day one because of work commitments, and crappy weather Friday. I opted for a more manageable 9 straight days, rather than 10 (LOL). Today, I popped my Interactive and Film cherry.

Having never been to the Interactive portion of SxSW before, I was working with a clean slate of expectations. It did seem however, as though the Barcamp or unconference model has started to diffuse over into the conference world. Given the subject matter and people at SxSWi this was not too surprising.

I attended a number of sessions about startups and bootstrapping, and several specifically focused on Ruby on Rails. These were not new subject areas for me, I was more interested in seeing their mainstream adoption. Mid afternoon, I also managed to sneak out, and walk down the street a block to the Barcamp Austin IV location, at the old Paradox nightclub. I must say, although the location was great (relative to SxSW), the actual venue did not work for me. In fact, this is the first Barcamp I would call a Fail.

For the remainder of the day I hit several of the outside parties, saw Doc Searls interviewed, and straiffed the Dorkbot event, which included a guy that had built a large modular analog synthesizer (from modified PAIA kits and synthesizers.com). I ended the night with a pair of films, including Daryl Wein's and Zoe Lister-Jones', Breaking Upward. An absolutely fantastic movie in the narrative feature realm.

Now, off to prepare breakfast, and head downtown for my day 2.

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