SXSW 2006: It's over (Part 2 of 2)

I broke this up into two parts, if you haven't read the first part, feel free to do so.

With it being a little late the night before, I slept in and rushed in for the first panel of the day. I jumped into a presentation simply titled 'Dirk Knemeyer' but was pleasantly surprised to find him talking about starting a business. I was enjoying everything out of this. It was interesting to look out into the crowd and see the likes of James Archer, Ryan Carson and Drew McLellan. Rob Jones, who works at frog design, was nice and introduced himself to me as I snuck in. We chatted after the panel for a bit and was a great 15 minute or so conversation that I wish I had with everyone who came to SXSW.

Next up was Next Generation of Web Apps featuring moderation by Jeffrey Veen (who did so very well). George Oates of Flickr provided some interesting new design work that could see the light of day. Erik Rodenbeck showed off some nice visualizations including maps of the movement of taxis. One of the key things to come out of this panel was the concept of iteration of design with releases coming out every couple days to couple weeks.

Did lunch at Chipotle's with a motley band of southby goers. And guess what? I missed the keynote once again. I hopped into the RSS: Not Just for Blogs panel but became bored and left. I think by this point I had just tired of the panels and felt I enjoyed myself more when just hanging in the hallways. Chatted briefly with Molly and Andy Clarke as they checked out some of the comments on the newly introduced WaSP site. Sat next to Mike Davidson and chatted with him for a few minutes. I'd have to give him my vote for best business card based on feel alone.

After the final panel had made it's way out, a bunch of us went out for dinner at Moonshines just around the corner. It got a little sappy with everybody offering their best and worst moments of this year's SXSW. I decided to let loose a little and finally had a couple drinks. After dinner, we took the walk down to the Media Temple party and with a little less inhibition I proceeded to have a few more drinks. (In fact, there's photographic evidence of my rather poor drink-handling abilities.) I stayed pretty much till the end at which point a bunch of us decided to go to IHOP and grab a bite to eat. This was at about 3:00AM. Considering I had to get up at 6:00AM to catch an 8:00AM flight, this might not have been the smartest move. Finally getting into bed around 4:30, I managed to get some sleep (and managed to wake up) before taking the trip back to Ottawa.

This concludes my trip to South by South West Interactive 2006.