SXSW the hotel experience

I got to Austin late and checked into the hotel around 10:00 PM. The first room
was a smoking room and smelled like the 405 freeway at rush hour. My clothes smelled from standing in the doorway for a minute. The second room was better. The room smelled like a hotel room, but the bathroom....oh the bathroom. The bathroom had the distinctive scent of puke. I knew it well. That ever present Saturday morning smell from my freshman dorm at college. I decided to stay and scrubbed the sink down with mouthwash (Listerine is like liquid duct tape). After that, the room was fine.
My hotel experience reminded me of a bunch of other places that I don't like to visit. I backpacked through Indonesia in '96. I like the countryside much more than most of the cities. Outside Yogyakarta, I had a dinner which was called Chicken, but may have been raw, yet steaming, human flesh. There are a bunch of others, but, I refrain for now.

Today, I hit a few different panels. Getting Unstuck: Desktop to Device was totally over my head and I left pretty fast. Ran into a friend from home, who as it turns out, is a wicked blog queen, here to speak on a panel. The real gift of today was the Art of Speed panel. It was manned by; Tim Ferriss of Four Hour Work Week fame, Mike Cassidy of Benchmark Capital, Evan Williams of Twitter and Obvious and Cali Lewis host of Geekbrief. They were amazing. Inspired. It's cool to see people that love what they do and maintain there balance. One of the things they talked about was passion. Another was personal life and keeping it balanced.

It really was inspiring. I spent the half hour after the panel figuring out how to make an online festival happen. I think that will be my next project.