Today, I depart for the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, TX. You know it is going to be a good trip when you show up at the airport two hours early and find out that you can play World of Warcraft on the airport’s free wifi while you wait! At some point, the airline offered up a $300 voucher for anyone who wanted to volunteer their spot on the plane and get bumped to the next flight 2 hours later—yes, getting paid $300 to play WoW for two hours is pretty bad ass. No dice when all was said and done though, as they ended up not needing my seat after all.
I had the good fortune to sit directly in front of two shrieking toddlers for the three hour flight, but with a bit of help from the last Twilight audiobook, even them kicking the back of my seat incessantly couldn’t fade my good mood.
I had booked a ride with Super Shuttle to get from the airport to Nick’s house. Nick, by the way, is an incredibly talented tattoo artist, so be sure to check out his work. At any rate, Super Shuttle is the shit—I was at Nick’s house about twenty minutes after I landed, and they even gave me front door service!
Up until this point, I hadn’t officially met Nick, though we had been emailing back and forth for a bit about some tattoo work that I’m commissioning from him in the near future. He was rad enough to offer me his couch when I told him that I’d be in Austin, so that was a total relief. We settled on me trading him some vegan dinners during my time there, which seemed like a great exercise of the barter system.
So we met, things went well—he’s rad, I’m rad, and we both know some of the same rad people, etc. He was busy working on a drawing for this long tattoo session that he has coming up tomorrow, so I let him be and went off to get settled and check my voicemail. As it turns out, I had a voicemail from CBS Interactive (that artist formerly known as CNET) waiting for me—a follow-up from a series of interviews I had done with them a few days prior. So, I call my CBS dude back, and he offers me an amazing and irresistible offer making quite a bit more than I was making at my last job! I was completely floored by the offer, and super excited being that they were my number one pick, and had been on my top ten list of dream employers for a number of years. Awesome awesome awesome, and of course I had to call a few key figures and drop the news on them. Everyone is happy, everyone wins, and a massive burden has been removed from my shoulders.
While waiting for Nick to get to a good stopping point on his drawing work so that we could go grab some food, I worked on my Simply Rails 2 book for a few hours, learning all about key components of the Ruby programming language—and object oriented programming at large—things such as instance variables and the like.
Later in the evening, we headed to The Parlor, which is a pizza place that has fantastic vegan pizza with vegan cheese and several mock meats that they make in-house (pepperoni, sausage & chicken). I think our total was around $25 for a gigantor mock sausage and mushroom pizza—though they were out of our first choice: pepperoni. Now most of you know how much of a piggy I am; I can eat and eat and eat some more (Thur has fallen victim to my slender-body-bottomless-stomach motif several times, just ask him about it). Well, let’s just put it this way: the pizza was so big that I had difficulty finishing the last piece of my half—I have a suspicion that Nick is a rival to my big piggy throne, because he hardly seemed phased. My only complaint really—aside from the fact that they were out of perpperoni—was that the pizza could have used a bit more sauce. Pretty damn good aside from that.
Oh yeah, and prior to getting our large amount of food, Nick and I got to play pool for free for half an hour—well, I’m not sure that our respective pool shark skill levels (or lack there of) really qualify us as having “played” pool for half an hour, but we knocked the balls around and sunk several accidentally in the process. Nick definitely beat me both times, so maybe I’m just speaking for myself here.
After pizza, we headed to this anarchist collective called Rizome Collective to volunteer a bit of our night to mailing books to prisoners per their request. unfortunately, Rizome will officially be in limbo after Monday due to having been evicted because of some building code violations or something. Pretty unfortunate really.