There Is No Cat

Deep in the heart of Texas

After years and years of considering and deciding against, this year I decided to go to the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, next March. I registered on Friday, and booked a hotel room at one of the least expensive hotels within walking distance (to cut costs, I’m going to try and do this without a rental car, unlike my usual pattern where I rent something so I can explore the area in my down time). In past years, I’ve passed up the opportunity because it generally conflicts with another event that I’ve been attending for almost 20 years, but there’s no conflict this year, and besides, I missed that other event last year for the first time since I started going and found that it felt kind of good not to go for a change. I think I spent some time coasting on my existing skills in recent years, so it’s been a while since I’ve been to a web-related conference. I’ve felt the fire return in the past few months, so it seems like a good time to go to something like this and see if I can find anything to help further upgrade my skills. But I think the deciding factor was my increasing desire to actually meet some of the people I read regularly face-to-face in the wake of my lunch with Suw Charman a few weeks ago. I don’t know if there are many people still reading There Is No Cat in the wake of my sporadic posting in recent months, but if you are and you’re going to be at SXSW Interactive, let me know. I’d like to touch base. You can post something in the comments, or reach me by e-mail by string together my first name, my last name, and a ".org", with the requisite symbol between the first and last names.

It would have been nice to stick around for the music part of the festival too, but even if I could have afforded to, I have a very important wedding to attend that weekend.

Posted at 11:00 AM