Archive for March, 2010

sxsw roundup

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

I did a  post about the first day at SXSW, but I failed to post any others for the following 9 days.  I also made 0 tweets, but successfully checked into a total of 4 places on foursquare.

I am absolutely terrible at this Blogging/Twitter/foursquare thing.

Anyways, SXSW was a blast.  Austin is a great city, and everyone that went there with Cloudkick had a great time.

The high and low lights:

  • Most Memorable: Get Low – Bill Murray, Robert Duvall, and Sissy Spacek all came to this screening.  Did the Q&A afterwords, and Bill Murray great.  Movie while it has some humor building up to the final scene thanks to Bill Murray, was really all about great acting by Robert Duvall.
  • They let you Bar tend? – A Kamikaze does not include cranberry juice.  I know there are a ton of bars (and therefore you need a ton of bar tenders) in Austin, but really?
  • Wow: Werner Vogel at the Big Data Cluster meetup.  Great job by Stu Hood to refute some of his silliness, and it was good to meet more Apache Cassandra developers, like the current PMC chair Jonathan Ellis in person.
  • New Favorite Band: Murder by Death - I loved the combination of Electronic Cello, with the deep voice and great songs.
  • Best non-BBQ Food: Koriente – Nice and Fresh food, and of course bubble tea.  Not that we went to many non-BBQ places this week, but this restaurant was a pleasant surprise and break from BBQ.
  • Best BBQ: Not sure, we went to many BBQs spots, including Stubbs, Iron Works, and Salt Lick.  Salt Lick I guess was a cool experience, but I did enjoy the night Ryan Phillips brought over Rudy’s to our Roof Deck.
  • Speakin of Roof Decks:  Wow, we got really lucky with the place we rented for the week, a roof deck overlooking the entire downtown.
  • Best Pass: I think I enjoyed the Film pass by far, the Interactive… I honestly went to like 3 sessions.  Music was good too, but I felt like I don’t get to see many movies, while music is easier to experience over the internet without a 2 hour time sink.

sxsw day 1

Saturday, March 13th, 2010

Everyone from Cloudkick arrived in Austin for SXSW 2010 on Thursday evening, so Day 0 technically.  Bob found us a nice condo to rent just outside the downtown, but still easy walking distance to everything.  We picked up our badges from a relatively short line that night, and then headed over to Iron Works BBQ bout 8:45.

On Friday, the first actual day of SXSW:

  • Grabbed lunch at Annies, and met with Jerry Chen who has been contributing to the libcloud project.
  • Opened CASSANDRA-885 bug report.  OOMing after the node crashed, as its unable to replay its commit log.
  • Went to a showing of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo“.  The movie was very intense, but I still liked it.  Showing was at the Alamo, and having a Margarita while watching was even better.
  • Had dinner with the entire crew at Stubb’s.  Loved the brisket.
  • After some bar hopping, we ended up back at the pad… playing Rock Band.