go bold

Highlights from this crazy, ridiculous party:

Saturday

• Sharing a great lunch after the “Startup or Sellout” Conversation with new friends
• Eating a late dinner and catching up with Amy and Michael
• Impromptu wine party with Gary of Wine Library TV
• Walking halfway across Austin for 16bit
• Tricking the bouncer with fake laminates at the PureVolume party with Causes guys

Sunday

• Catching up with more old LimeWire friends over an excellent Mexican (and expensed) lunch
• Hearing Mark Zuckerberg and Sara Lacy make awkward conversation at the SXSW keynote
• Enjoying another Kathy Sierra talk
• Listening to the guys from ICanHasCheezburger.com talk about their ridiculous story
• Chatting up random Austinites and trying to stay warm

Monday

• Running in the rain to lunch with lots of interaction design folks from AOL, Google, and CafeMom (whose sister goes to MIT – small world!)
• Watching Frank Warren give his (warm fuzzy-filled) keynote and seeing a proposal happen in front of our eyes :)
• Listening to Mark Zuckerberg field more questions (relevant and otherwise) at Facebook Developer Garage
• Watching Drop.io guys talk about their product! Love simplicity + not having to register to do simple things
• Having dinner with the Chief Cheezburger of ICanHasCheezburger, receiving career advice, and receiving a much-needed shove in the pants
• Partying the night away until my 7:00am flight tomorrow morning!

Excitement. People, badges, tech schwag, and — everywhere — alcohol.

Maybe tech geeks need liquid courage. Maybe we just flow that way. It’s odd to be away from school, to have these “you have psets to do and team projects to worry about” when I’m 20 feet away at any given time from any random Internet celebrity. Tantek Celik? Check. Nick Douglas, whom I only saw today for the first time but is plenty hilarious in person? Check.

I’m not entirely sure what the purpose of this post is besides -> I am here. At SXSW and it (as well as Texas as a whole… definitely not in Boston anymore) is such a trip. But a good one — and one with plenty left to unravel.

I did it — after having reserved my plane tickets two weeks ago (cancellable via JetBlue, so I could chicken out if I wanted to), I finally felt confident enough that I won’t be missing anything crucial over the weekend of SxSW that I… swallowed hard and registered for the conference.

I’m ridiculously excited. There’re a few things I’m missing (plus I just found out, the weekend afterwards is not only super busy with some extracurricular activities, Barcamp Boston2 is also taking place at MIT) in order to be in Austin, but hopefully it’ll all be worth it in the end.

On another Silly Excited Christine note, my business cards came in the mail today… or “identity cards,” being that I’m still only a student. My first chance to give them out might actually be SxSW — how exciting! :D