SXSW Education 2019
I’ve been to SXSW several times and love Austin. Every time I visit, I try to extend my time as much as possible. This year I had asked work if they would cover a few extra days so that I could attend SXSW EDU. In the end, I ended up paying for everything myself, which meant I was actually on holiday while at the conference. Oddly, I didn’t mind this. When work pays for a conference I feel I have to attend everything that will be useful to my work, even sessions that I don’t expect to find interesting. I feel I have to maximise the return on the expense. Without the pressure to attend all sessions, I could attend the sessions that interested me and drop out of the conference whenever I felt like a break. It also meant the evenings were my own with no pressure to start…
End of an era
I seem to regularly posting long opinion pieces to Facebook. I’m not sure why they don’t end up here, but as I’m going to try and resurrect this blog, I thought I’d start by reblogging this….. This isn’t a post about my feelings about Trump. He’s now in office. All I’ll say is, let’s hope the position makes him more Presidential. This post is about the person leaving office, President Obama. In 2009, I was lucky enough to be at a conference in Florida on the 20th January. I was sitting in a presentation when the presenters cleverly segwayed into a live stream. The live stream of the inauguration of President Obama. It was amazing how many US citizens left the presentation, heading for lunch. I guess they were Republicans. But there was also a spark of excitement amongst the greater number of people who stayed. The presenter (who I…
SXSW 2016 (Interactive and Film)
So I’ve finally got round to writing up my impressions of SXSW 2016 Interactive and Film. This year I mainly went for music and I’ve already blogged about my impressions and why this is likely to be my last SXSW. But I thought I’d briefly cover my Interactive and Film sessions. This year was SXSW’s 30th Anniversary. My first visit was in 2011, SXSW’s 25th and that was big and brash. This year’s festival felt more low key than the 25th. This is an odd thing to say when the keynote was given by President Obama. But I felt there was less of a buzz than previous years, especially during music week. Although I mainly attend for the music, I do go to the occasional Interactive and watch a few of the films and documentaries. As far as interactive is concerned, Obama was the big draw. Attendance was through a…
SXSW in Tweets and Facebook status
It’s fine writing a review of something afterwards. But what did I really thing of Austin and SXSW? My SXSW Storified. [View the story “My SXSW 2013” on Storify]
SXSW (belated review)
A few weeks ago I took the opportunity to visit Austin for SXSW 2011. With the conference being a darling of the tech media, I thought I’d sample the whole thing, SXSW Interactive, Film and Music. I may blog about music on my gig blog so this blog will concentrate on the Interactive and Film element. This was my first trip to SXSW, my first trip to Austin, and my first trip to Texas. With no direct flight to Austin, I decided to visit Houston before travelling the short hop to Austin. This gave me the opportunity to take a ‘Level 9′ tour of the Johnson Space Center. The tour is a ‘private’ tour for 12 visitors. You’re driven by a tour guide in a minivan around the NASA campus and visit areas closed to the standard tour. The tour doesn’t follow a fixed path and the tour guide decides…