Quick story before the real content
One of the questions that I received the most at this year’s SXSW was “What happened to Whitespace?” A good question and all I could provide those that ask was this simple answer:
I can’t login to MT.
I had been shutout of my own installation. So therefore you get a site with no content for over a month. Well I tried everything in my power to try and get it to work, but nothing was working. So now I have downloaded all the files and done a database dump from MySQL and am starting from scratch. Old content is still there just not linked to at the moment. Hopefully order will be restored shortly.
The Highlights
Kickball. The Business Logs team showed up to the kickball game with only one intention: to beat the crap out of anybody daring to step in our direction. As fate would have it the great Anil Dash put me on a team separate from Mike and Matthew. Oh well I figured, I could dominate this game by my lonesome. I mean I was playing against other fellow web geeks so how hard could this be?
Not enough space to tell the whole story, but I can sum it up like this. I kicked the shit out of the ball twice and celebrated with the best run scoring dance of all time…only to lose the game in extra innings.
Meeting the Doctor. Who in the hell is the doctor? The doctor is D. Keith Robinson. I call him the doctor because I always thought the D meant doctor. Well I later found out it stood for Doogie so I wasn’t that far off. Anyways, it was cool to finally meet him because we all know how much of a super dork he is on his site, but in real life he is one cool brother. Very easy to drink him under the table though (I can say this because he is still at SXSW and probably won’t read this…)
Seeing I am not alone. Some of you are aware of the party lifestyle I live. Rundle was here last Tuesday to spend a couple days in Tampa before going to Austin so he got to witness the crazyness that is my life. To say the least I don’t hangout with web people or anybody that remotely resembles someone that knows how to turn on a computer. So I fully admit to wondering if I was going to be a stranger in a strange land at SXSW.
There were a couple of people that were really great fun to hangout with. Don’t get me wrong, everyone was fun to talk to, but hanging out with someone past midnight takes a certain type of fun factor. Now I can have fun just chatting with people past midnight, but there are just party types that like to keep it going for a bit longer. These are the ones that had it:
- Mike “Who Said Jewish People Can’t Dance?” Rundle
- D. Keith “I’m Gonna Kick Scrivs Ass” Robinson
- Sergio “Will You Marry Me?” Villarreal Pou
- Garrett “Silly Web Design Midgets” Dimon
Now if you aren’t on the list, it’s no diss to you. These are just the group of guys that I found myself spending the most time with after midnight doing what I usually do in Tampa.
My Acceptance Speech. You see Business Logs was up for the Best Blog award at SXSW and the only competition we had was some no-name guy who goes by The Wolf. Well the no-name won and when he got up on stage he said something to the effect of:
Take that Scrivs!
Or something like that. But what I heard was:
Haha, Scrivs you punkass, how do you like dem apples?!?!
So of course I did what any other sane blogger would do and went onstage and did No-Name’s acceptance speech for him. The legend of the Spotlight Stealer has now been fully established.
Liquid vs. Fixed It was Monday night/Tuesday morning and this was easily the best night I had there. This night was only for the true party types and played out like a game of Survival seeing who can stay up the latest. I lost because I crashed at 7:30 am, but what really made this night fun was Patrick Griffiths popping the most controversial question in our lil design community. Let me set the mood.
In a suite on the 17th floor of the Hilton at about 5-6am you have around 10 people in a room feeling ‘nice’ as I like to call it. Some of these people include Molly “Checkout my Jew fro” Holzschlag (as she kept on calling it), The Doctor, Jeremy “Which is the first name and which is the last” Keith, Garrett, and Kyle Bradshaw. There were others, but these were the ones whose lives would change forever.
Everyone is drinking, chilling, screaming, and being very professional *cough*. All of a sudden there is silence and PTG screams out:
Fixed or Liquid?!?!?!?
WTF?!?!
To say the least all hell broke loose after that and the only thing I remember is thinking I am never getting into this argument with Jeremy Keith again because he is going to write a whole damn manual on this crap within 10 minutes.
Good times.
Good Times All Over
I had a great time and will be there next year for sure. So many events that I didn’t reflect upon in this entry and so many people that I need to say my thanks to for bearing with my inconsistencies. You go into these situations looking not to make a fool of yourself because understandably many of these people consider you to be a professional. I went in with the opposite approach. I was me through and through and mostly everyone seemed to enjoy that. That was a good feeling.
Monday I will talk about the lowlights that many of the people on the web refuse to discuss because I don’t want to make it seem like everything was peaches and cream. There are some bastards in this industry and they proved it while I was there.
Originally posted on March 18, 2005 @ 2:45 pm