To top off the week of life-changes and opportunity, I was working on Thursday's lecture in the hotel room in Austin last night and I got a call from Yahoo. They want me to sign on as a User Experience Designer. Ack!

Today's Koan: Be careful what you wish for. you just might get it. All of it. All at once. 2000 miles away from home. Well, I'll be geting back soon, so maybe life will start making a little more sense once I'm back in familiar grounds.

Lots and lots of changes, not just in my life, but lots of changes are in for the blog. I mentioned it before, but I'll say it agian because it has such impact: The thoughts that this conference/festival/meeting of so many minds has opened my doors of perception on expression on the web. There's so much to be done and I need to go do some of it. Now I'm actually looking forward to a relatively quiet spring break at home so I can create...

Wheee!!!!

Last night AOLiza was graced with the award for Best Humor/Satire site of 2000 at the SXSW Interactive Festival! I just want to say thanks to everyone who's visited the site and who has passed it on to friends and co-workers. Wow. Thanks!

SXSW is continuing to be a blast. I feel like 'independent net' is where 'independent film' was 30 years ago, and I just know everyone here will be looking back on these as the real formative years, where internet experiential projects were born as a major art form. It's just too cool...

I've met (and been rocked by) everyone Leia Scofield has met and been rocked by, and of course Leia as well. I also got to hang out with peterme and some of the gang of the newly formed Adaptive Path.

The award show is in about 90 minutes. Woo hoo!

There's really far, far too much to blog in the (looking at watch (ACK!)) two minutes before the next panel. Okay, I'll default to the quickie bulletpoint hitlist (in rought chronological order), to be fleshed out later:

• I found out Friday that I got accepted into the Berkeley SIMS Masters Program as well as CMU, so that adds another beanie spinner to my thinking cap.
• I met up with Ernie and Min Jung without incident and we flew to Austin by way of San Diego. We watched Ferris Beuller's Day Off on the flihgt ot Austin on my Powerbook (realizing halfway through that the 'one-set-of-headphones' problem could be overcome by turning on subtitles (duh!))
• I got invited to speak on a panel! SXSW has, at the last minute, added a "Humor on the Internet" panel for Monday (tomorrow), and they've invited me to be a panelist. This should be a hoot!
• Weblogger parties Friday and Satruday, I got to meet in person Brad from Bradlands, Leia from leiascofield.com (too lazy to write linking code right now), Megnut, and like 30 others.
• My whole view of blogging has been dramatically changed. Writing into my own screen and seeing that people actually read it is completely different than hanging out with people who know me and who I know solely through this (im/ultra)personal method of divulgence.
• I have a lot more inspiration for making new projects (I have about five twenty that I want to do) knowing that people really are interested in them not just for their in-the-moment entertainment value, but for the deeper issues and movements they bring up and reflect.
• The web awards ceremony is tonight! After that are the frog and fray parties. I'm the wuss of our group, not going raving or clubbing until 3am, actually getting some sleep (unlike Ernie who, as he writes this post next to me as I type, is going on 20 minutes sleep in the last 40 hours.

I'm forgetting a lot. I'm gathering so much data, both socilogical and experimental, that it's going to take a few days away from the conference for me to write it all into the blogging manifesto I feel bubbling up within me. I'll post again as soon as I'm able (we have an ethernet port in the hotel room, but I think it's all a facade).

Until then, hi from Austin! I'll talk to you soon!

Well, tomorrow I'm off to Austin to attend the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, quickly becoming the Sundance of the Interactive world (and quite a film and music festival in its own right).

It seems like people from all areas of my interactive life will be coming to SXSW, and it should be very cool spending time with some people I haven't had a chance to hang out with much, and seeing some of my online compatriots for the first time. AOLiza is a finalist in the 'Humor/Satire' category, so I might be bringing back some good news as well.

I'll be wired to the gills so, if anything, expect more activity on Fury.com while I'm in Austin. I'll be taking pictures and posting journal entries daily (while grading midterms and assignments, and writing up a lesson plan for when I get back).

On a wider scope, I'll be visiting CMU in April (I was going to go during my spring break, but it turns out that it's theirs as well, and the week after is CHI2001 in Seattle, so there wouldn't be anyone at CMU then either), and I may hear from Yahoo in a similar timeframe, though recent events there are a little worrying.

Speaking to Marce at CMU, I found that one-year deferrals are common, but two-years are rarely granted. This is an option to consider, as it would let me rest, work, and make a little money before going back to school for one last year. On the other hand, it would have the feeling of 'putting life on hold' and would mena I'd have to find an employer who wouldn't mind a one-year commitment. As usual, I've got some thinking to do.

Well, I've got to return to my mad rush of getting everything ready for my trip. I feel like the Mad Hatter! Next stop, Wonderland.

This is funny on so many levels (which is why it's destined to be the meme that supplants 'All your base'). Make a large company, make a theme song to rally your troops, post it to the Compendium of Corporate Cringe.

These are the internal 'theme songs' of such powerful organizations as KPMG, IBM, Price Waterhouse-Coopers, SGI, and so on. I have so many unrelated comments on these that I'm going to bullet them, rather than try to create prose:

• The KPMG song seems to have a purpose: to keep people off hold. Any problem you might have necessitating a call to KPMG will diminish in importance as you are either lulled to sleep by, or nauseated by, this repetitive, pointless mantra of pointy-haird-bossyish gung-ho drivel marketspeak. Your mission is to get off the phone.
• Take Disney music, stripoff everything but the chorus, take out any sentimentality or sense of fun, suck out the Menken and Ashman and replace it with G (Kenny) and Tesh, and put it on repeat and you might have something similar to these 'songs'.
• From a design perspective, these are awful failures. They're (almost) all prime examples of taking the mantra of "I am not the target user" way, way too far. If these say anything at all about how the corprate eschelons perceive the people carrying the company on their backs, then you should leave that company as fast as possible.
• So that's where all those '80s light synth musicians and their instruments went...

To sum up, listen at your own peril.

So yes, I saw Tiffany in concert on campus today. Sure, I felt the teen nostalgia, yes, I enjoied the fans overwhelmed to tears by confronting their teen idol, but it was also a chance to try my hand at making a flash montage of a Lower Sproul concert for the web.

Check out the virtual concert if you like. It's almost like being there. I also have a gallery of all the images.

Oh, and I gave the band a Cameo camera, so we just might see the fruits of their labor as well!

(Okay, this is the last bit on Tiffany, promise!) I heard two great quotes today:

"Who's playing?"
"Tiffany."
"Tiffany who?"
"The Tiffany"
"I thought she died..."

and...

"It's just like 'Behind the Music' only louder!"

Ahh...

Well, since it's not going to happen, now I can talk more about it. This weekend me and about 14 of my friends took off to Sacramento to take a look at a fabulous house in Sacramento.

With 13 bedrooms, 9 bathrooms, a palatial first floor with living room, dining room, parlor, library, den, commercial kitchen, and a sprung floor ballroom in the basement, this manor, built in 1913, is truly amazing. At $850,000 it's enough to make even people happy with their lives perk up their ears and take a stab at finding a way to make it work.

Well, long story short, we took a look and were really impressed. Sighs were released around every turn, wistful as you can imagine. Sadly, the scenarios under which we could actually make it happen and make it profitable, or at least self-sufficient, were just out of reach. Making it into a B&B would cost too much in startup costs. Many 'quaint' rooms would have to be worked on to make them 'beautiful.' Also some reowrking of the walls would have to be done to make single rooms out of what are currently 'suites of apartments'. The ballroom, which we all wanted to be beautiful, had been converted into a carpeted rec area, though the floor was still there under the carpet and fabulous. Also, while okay for many rooms, a 7.5" ceiling is decidedly claustrophobic for grand ballroom dancing.

Still the experience was a great one, and we're all so glad we went, despite schlepping through pouring rain to and from Sacramento. It was interesting to explore new ideas and possibilities, if not for now, perhaps for another time. At the very least, we had a nice field trip and got to see one of the most amazing structures in Sacramento.

Megnut.com has been on my daily list of reads for over a year (and as I write this it's still in my 'Weblogs I Dig' navmodule), but sadly it's no more (either it's on hiatus or gone for good).

Sad as I am to see it go, and how it seems to follow the decline of the pyra community (though, hopefully, not the greater blogger.com community) I was warmed that, even in the most minimal of web pages, Meg still used a linked stylesheet to format the single word on the page (check her site and view source to see). Nothing like sticking to good coding practices, no matter how short the piece.