3 Rules for a Successful SXSW,
published at 11:03am on 03/07/11, with 4 Comments
I first attended SXSW in 2000 when there were a couple of thousand of us packed into a couple of rooms at the Convention Center. We attended talks about the new “blogging” medium and the biggest party in town was at Frog Design’s offices. I’ve been back several times over the years, and I’ve adopted the following 3 rules for getting the most out of SXSW Interactive:
Rule #1: Attend the most academic talks that you can find
This is the most important and challenging rule to follow, mostly because SXSWi does not attract too many academic talks – it’s just not that kind of conference. But a few happen to sneak in, and those are real gems. The first couple of years I attended, I thought of this rule as the “attend talks about things you know nothing about,” but adding the academic twist really makes this the most important rule.
Given the group voting nature of the Panel Picker (final say of the selection committee not withstanding), most of the panels are on whatever the hot, trending topics are for that year. They don’t tend to be very in-depth simply because many of the attendees will be completely new to the topic, and the panelists want to present as much of an overview as possible. This is fine, except if you happen to know something about the topic that is going to be covered. In this case, you will simply not learn anything new because in reality, most of the people on these panels are just like you, except that they actually got their act together and submitted a talk.
The thing about academic talks is that, for the most part, the people giving the talks have actually spent time doing the research required to be an academic in their field. You will be listening to people who have done the actual time needed to construct an educated opinion about their subject area, and it will most likely be something that you know nothing about. The truth is that most of the panels at SXSWi are simply a retelling of anecdotes from the life of yet another startup, and you probably already read that blog post last month.
Rule #2: Attend talks by good speakers, no matter what they’re talking about
This one is a no-brainer. If you see a solo presentation being given by someone you know (or have heard) is a good speaker, go to that talk. Less impressive if they’re just on a panel, but that’s probably worth going to as well. The trick here is that there are some people who will be thought-provoking and interesting no matter what they’re talking about, so you might as well go and hear what it is that they’ve been thinking about. The featured speakers are good for this if you don’t know any of the people speaking: this year Clay Shirky and Marissa Mayer are pretty good bets.
Rule #3: Attend talks given by your friends
You’ll probably get in trouble if you decide to skip your friends’ panel for something and it turns out that the panel you decided to was a total turkey. After all, they did probably spend some time thinking about what it is that they are going to say, and it’d be nice for you to be there to support them. That said, this is a distant third to items #1 and #2 above, and if you decide to skip your friends’ panels because of those reasons, you’ll probably be in the clear.
Corollary: The conference in the hallway trumps all
Given the opportunity to hang out in the halls with someone awesome, abandon all other rules. One-on-one time is better than any panel you could attend.
A final note: don’t bother with panels that have clever-sounding names. You might think that they’re going to be a good idea, but unless they fall into one of the above rules, they will probably suck.
Oh, and have a breakfast taco as many breakfast tacos as possible.
Filed under: Observations, with 4 Comments
on giving up,
published at 2:02am on 02/21/11, with No Comments
I am a terrible snowboarder.
This past weekend I departed the city with some friends of mine an headed north for a weekend of hurtling down a mountain[1] for fun and recreation. Having tried snowboarding once before, and having remembered it as being not quite as terrible an experience I had expected, I boldly rented boots and a board and proceeded to spend the majority of the day falling down on my elbow[2].
With some pointers from a friend I was able to make my way down the mountain in one piece, but it was slow going, and rather painful. I would have moments of clarity where I would start to feel at one with my board, where I would lean into a turn and feel completely at ease on my board. Other times I would sit up from a fall and, forcing my heart to slow, relaxing my muscles and clearing my head, I would say to myself “I will make it down this mountain.” I would stand back up on my board, and for a second I would feel all of the pieces come together immediately before tumbling head first into an icy snowbank.
In the end, though, I made it through four runs that day. By the end of it, as the pain medication had kicked in and I was lounging on the sofa back at my friend’s house, licking my wounds, I declared: “Tomorrow, I will ski.”
Part of me wanted to stick with the snowboard. There was a part of me that told me not to give up. Told me that the second day would be better, that I would regret not giving it another chance. That it takes practice to become good at something, that there are things that I am not going to be good at right away and that if I just gave it a chance, I would become better. Part of me told me to not quit, to not give up.
But give up what, exactly?
I like to try new things. I like to learn things, learn facts, learn skills. I like to do things, and get better at them, sometimes to help me with my work, sometimes for myself, and sometimes for no reason at all, for the sheer joy in the experience of trying something new. And once I try something, then I would like to get better at it. After all, anything worth doing is worth doing well, right? And so I sat with that decision after our first day, and I thought about this idea that this thing, this snowboarding that I decided was going to be the thing I was going to do over the weekend, was a thing that I was going to give up on. Just walk away from it and say “this thing, this is no longer worth doing.” Was it just too hard for me? Was I just giving up? Not willing to put in the effort to learn how to do something well?
Again, what was I giving up? As it turns out, I’d forgotten about my goal to begin with. My goal for the weekend was to have fun. This, in itself, is a worthy goal. And I decided, based on past experience, that the way for me to accomplish this goal was by snowboarding. And when I found that snowboarding was not actually helping me to accomplish my goal, I gave up on it. This, it turns out, is actually ok. I was not giving up because I was bad at snowboarding, and I was not giving up because it was too hard, or because I was hurting myself. While all those things were true, it was the fact that snowboarding was not going to lead to fun for me, this weekend, that led me to give up.
I returned to the mountain the next day and I did trade my board in for a pair of skis. The first run out, I managed to make it down the mountain in one piece, and I had fun doing it. Just because I started the weekend snowboarding did not mean I needed to stick with it. In fact, sticking with it would have prevented me from achieving what I actually wanted this weekend, which was to have a good time with my friends.
Often, the clearest moment comes when you just take a step back and ask yourself “why?”
1. It is very difficult to, with a straight face, call anything in the northeastern part of the United States a “mountain,” but that’s the designation we’re going to use for now.
2. Interestingly, I did not spend as much time on my ass as I was led to believe I would, after an entire day of snowboarding. The bad news, of course, being that I spent most of the day bouncing my elbow off of the icy runs, which makes doing things like “moving my arms” more difficult than not. Also, the number of times I ended up bouncing my noggin off of the ice means that my neck is still sore some two days later. It’s not until you injure parts of your body that normally don’t get any pain-time that you realize just how many of your neck muscles you actually use when trying to stand up from a couch.
Filed under: Observations, Personal, with No Comments
on skating,
published at 5:01pm on 01/17/10, with 1 Comment
I went ice skating this morning. I woke up, had a glass of water, hopped on my bike, and rode up to the free seasonal ice rink. I waited on line for about 10 minutes while the father behind me explained to his child, the budding consumer, that while the price difference between a skate rental alone and the skate rental with the “skip the line” fee was only seven dollars, it was most certainly not a good use of money for them.
“What’s seven plus seven plus seven plus seven?” the boy asked his father.
“Can you figure it out yourself?” came the reply.
The boy thought for a minute. “Twenty-seven?” he asked.
“Close!” said the dad, “But you’re one off.”
“Twenty-eight!” said the boy, triumphantly.
I wonder if the lesson will stick. Not the math lesson, though that one is particularly useful as well. No, I mean the one of frugality. It’s how I was raised, to be sure, but there’s a part of me that always expects, living in Manhattan, that the notion of not spending the extra seven dollars to skip the line would seem far more out there than the cheapo option. Then again, the reality of raising two children in New York City is probably such that every dollar does, in fact, count. But for that to come across to the children as a “this is the way we do things” was a delight to see.
By now we’d reached the front of the line, and after opting out of having a photo of me taken in a “skating” pose, I donned my skates, stashed my belongings in a locker and got onto the ice.
I hadn’t been skating since last year when I’d unfortunately chosen the warmest day of the winter to hit the ice, meaning that what I was doing far more resembled swimming than skating. This time, however, it was pleasantly chilly, and I was able to get away with just a sweater and a light jacket, gloves and no scarf. As I stepped onto the ice, I immediately had to scurry away from the pile of children and parents gathering at the entrance to the rink. As this was a solo adventure, the lack of a skating companion meant that I was free to actually take in my surroundings. The dance that we do while skating in a crowded rink is really quite fascinating, both for the groups of people that appear on the ice, and for the interactions between them. I found myself skating in fits and starts around as I kept getting stuck behind a group of five holding hands (against the rules!) or a first-timer splayed out at my feet. It was then that I noticed a handful of skaters who were effortlessly gliding through the crowd, never changing pace, never slowing for a group of girls, holding hands, shuffling along, nor speeding up to move around the child who was suddenly hurtling along the ice on his butt as his legs kicked out from beneath him.
What I noticed about these skaters was that were always looking ahead, not merely in the space directly in front of them but rather at the entire landscape before them. They were looking for the openings that were about to appear, not the ones that were already there. They were looking for the child who was about to fall, or the couple, steps apart, who were about to link hands. By constantly monitoring their entire surroundings, they were never put in a position where they had to drastically change course; they’d already steered clear of that situation before it ever happened.
I started doing the same. As I began looking for the openings that were about to appear, I became aware of all of the calculations that I was doing, subconsciously, to try to determine the landscape. I first made note of everyone around me and their relative speeds. I then started looking at each person’s individual behavior, looking for clues as to how they were about to behave. A single arm out meant that the skater was looking for her companion and that they were about to link arms. A child, legs bent, arms out, was slowing down rapidly. The couple holding hands with neither party actually moving their feet were slowing down, and were most likely about to fall. The young man in a sweater and loosely tied hockey skates was about to cut across the ice. Hundreds and hundreds of these observations were being made in seconds, and as I remained conscious of it, I was able to dart in and out of the crowds easily. I knew what the collective rink was going to look like a few seconds before it actually did, and was able to avoid the constant blocks and tumbles that were happening all around me.
But the moment I stopped thinking about the rink, the moment I started looking around me, or started thinking about writing, or started thinking about work, the entire blueprint fell apart. I continued to be aware of the problems as they fell ahead of me, but I was more likely than not to have to step over the fallen child, or to stop in the middle of the ice as I got caught behind a wall of beginners.
As I get older, I am learning more and more that I am not able to multi-task. I can’t even task-switch effectively. When I was a child, I did not have a television in my room, I was not allowed to watch tv while doing my homework, and ultimately, the television was rarely on in my house. I know plenty of people who like having the tv on as “background noise,” and I will admit to coming home after a long day and turning on the television, simply because a quiet apartment can tend to be a lonely apartment. But the pictures on the screen, the constant droning from a glowing box is always enough to take at least 50% of my attention away from my task at hand to the point that if there is something on tv that I actually care about, I will just give up on my work, watch the program, and then turn it off, rather than try to do two things at once. There is nothing like silence and concentration to truly provide clarity.
Back at the park, the first drops of the afternoon rain that had been reported earlier were starting to fall. I took one more turn around the rink and hopped off the ice. I packed up my skates, threw my backpack on my back and headed out to the street where my bike was waiting for me.
I clipped in to my pedals and as I looked out at a sea of taxis and pedestrians I looked not for the traffic that was already there, but rather for the spaces that had yet to to appear.
P.S. Hey you – get off your damn cell phone when you’re driving.
Filed under: Observations, with 1 Comment
Ten. Years.,
published at 10:06am on 06/14/09, with 2 Comments
Ten years ago, just about this time of year, I moved to New York.
One.
Friday nights around one in the morning, the streets of the Village are filled with groups of men and women drifting from bar to bar. The men and women are rarely together at this time of night. The couples have all gone home already, having taken in a movie and a drink, and are now at home, asleep, comfortable knowing that they are together. The couples who have formed at a bar that evening, “coupled” only in that there are two of them, and they are together, have gone home for the evening, awkwardly pushing at each other in doorways, discovering each other in bed. At one in the morning, the groups that are left on the street are the men and the women who do not belong to either of these two categories. They have left their first bar, having found nobody suitable (or perhaps they weren’t even looking) and they have moved on to their second. They are with their friends, and they are talking about women, or men, or perhaps art, or love, but those things are all kind of the same, anyway. A taxi full of men idles next to a taxi containing one of the aforementioned couples, and the man at the window leans out of the taxi to shout “show us your tits,” to the woman in the cab next to him. “Don’t worry about him,” he say, gesturing to the man sitting next to her, “show us your tits.” And the light turns green and the traffic starts moving again and the man in the taxi with his friends is still leaning out of the window making obscene gestures with his hand, his tongue, and his cheek.
Two.
I stand on a street corner giving directions to a friend of mine. As he walks away, a well-dressed couple walks up to me and asks if I can help them with directions. They are looking for a movie theatre. Someone has told them to walk down the avenue until they find one. I name two independent theaters that I know in the neighborhood and they hold out a flyer for a third. “Oh,” I say, “is that the theater you’re looking for?” “No, no,” the woman says, folding up the green sheet of paper. “We want to go see ‘The Hangover.'” Remember to always clarify the question before giving an answer. Later, a man calls out to me “hey buddy, hey buddy,” and I walk right past him.
Three.
New Yorkers have, at their disposal, an almost infinite number of activities to do on any given day. This weekend alone I had on my calendar a talent show, two concerts, a documentary screening, a potluck dinner, dim sum, dinner with a friend and a BBQ event. This is not including the outdoor art festival or the weekend-long music festival. I woke up on Saturday in a state of panic. I woke up not wanting to do anything, but was overwhelmed by the number of things that I would not be doing if I chose to not do any of it. I padded around my apartment for about an hour, worrying about all of the things that I did not want to do and thinking about how I might go about doing them, until I realized that I was under no obligation to do any of it. Instead, I went out for a bike ride and did laundry. As I scrubbed soap into the stains on my shirt collar, I decided that there are worse things in life than having too many options.
Four.
Riding a bicycle is one of the most exciting and efficient ways of getting around this city. In the past several years I have become one of those people who would prefer to hop on a bike than get on the subway in order to get from point A to point B. And in that time I have also discovered that there are two distinct classes of people in this town: those who share this philosophy with me, and those who wish us dead. While pedestrians in this town have no particular respect for automobiles, they do not, in general hate the car drivers themselves. One may dislike traffic, or one may dislike SUVs, or one may dislike the fact that, on occasion, someone will blow through your neighborhood without a muffler, but on a car-by-car basis, people rarely get angry at the driver. Pedestrians hate cyclists, however. People will actively go out of their way to tell you how much they dislike the fact that you ride a bicycle. The other day, as I weaved through a crosswalk that was full of people crossing against a light, someone shouted after me “why don’t you ride on the sidewalk?” And followed this with an expletive. A friend had a man crossing the street walk out of his way to kick her back tire. And when I am forced into a sea of taxis and garbage trucks because a delivery guy decides he’s going to come barreling down the bike line against traffic, I know exactly where these people are coming from. Fucking cyclists.
Five.
I called the city the other day to file a noise complaint about the screeching noise coming from the rooftop next to my apartment. It keeps me up at night and I have considered that if this noise does not stop, I may have to move. I called the city to file a noise complaint and realized that I have become that guy. I am perfectly ok with this.
Six.
I have never felt more at home than I have living here. Well, ok. Maybe one other time.
Filed under: Observations, Personal, with 2 Comments
Happy things,
published at 10:11am on 11/25/08, with 1 Comment
Recently, I spent the day going through old emails when I came across one, from myself, with the subject line “Happy things”
Just like that. No punctuation, first letter capitalized as my mobile messaging device does for me, automatically.
“Seeing people logged in and idle for days at a time over holidays.”
I wrote this to myself two days before Christmas last year. I often write notes1 like this to remind myself of thoughts I may have had, ideas I wanted to commit to paper, things that just made me feel good. This particular thought made me feel good.
I had just logged in to an instant messaging service. I live close to my family, so the holidays are never a time for travel for me. Two days before Christmas, I was most likely blocks from my house, wandering around the city, enjoying the energy that inevitably comes at that time of year. Not since college has the holiday season brought the stress of travel, of waiting at airports and bus terminals, of being with family and not with friends. I’ve never really lived far enough away that the house where I grew up no longer felt like home. In fact, the most holiday travel I have ever done was to pile into the family car (a station wagon, natch) and visit cousins, aunts, uncles or grandparents a couple of hours away.
But so many people do travel for the holidays. It is inevitably the week of December 25th that finds many of my friends taking off from work, packing up presents and a week’s worth of clothing and heading out of town on a train upstate, a plane to California, a bus to Pennsylvania, and all points in between. And much of the time, with the excitement of the holidays, they will rush out of work, computers still on, cursors still blinking, and messaging programs still marking their presence at their terminals. And so it is, days later, that I will turn on my computer and see those names, greyed out, idling on the side of my screen. They will have been like this for days – “38 hours idle, 72 hours idle” – and I will know that these friends are heading home for the holidays, to family and friends, or off on a holiday adventure, away from work, away from their everyday lives.
They will stay like that for days, silently sitting on the edge of my screen until, without fail, on Christmas day, the buddy list lights up again. A few pop on first thing in the morning, before running downstairs to open presents. The rest of the family is asleep, and they are transformed into five year-olds again, waiting, waiting until they can rush under the tree to see what Santa left for them. Or it is mid-morning, the coffee is on, the house is starting to wake up, waffles cooking in the kitchen. Or it is afternoon, and my screen is alive with announcements of gifts given and received, of plans for the rest of the day. Or it is evening, and it is stories of movies watched under blankets with fires in the fireplace, or dinners at Chinese restaurants, because there is nothing else open on Christmas day. And then the day is over, and the final few messages trickle in with greetings and goodbyes and promises to catch up in the New Year.
I love technology and how connected we all feel these days. But in this age of the always-on, it’s nice to be reminded that, at least once a year, everyone isn’t2.
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