The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Started the day with a stacked pork enchilada at Iron Cactus…

…which has a very nice rooftop patio, and yesterday’s weather was perfect for it.

I then went to the convention center, where I helped out a little at the Windows Phone booth. I noticed that the Kinect lounge was quiet and neglected, so I fired up Dance Central and got the crowd going.

My efforts did not go unnoticed…

Even better, an unexpected treat. My friends Kate Melville and David Halls are here for their first SxSW! They decided to come at the last minute in order to look for backing for their film Twenty Questions. So far, things seem to be going well; while the Canadian film industry has been responding to them with excuses for why it can’t be done, the Americans have been looking for reasons why it can.

I caught Jane McGonigal’s presentation on how games can make for better people and a better world. I’ll post my notes from it later.

Best poster of the conference:

And yes, I do like ‘em too.

You couldn’t miss these posters for tomorrow’s Internet Explorer 9 launch event – it features Yeasayer, The Head and the Heart and Fences. If you’re not familiar with YeaSayer, check out the video for their best-known track at the moment, Ambling Alp.

Later that evening, I ended up at The HighBall (Austin’s big cocktail lounge / bowling alley, straight out of Mad Men) for the Fandango / Alamo Drafthouse Cinema party…

…which featured Karaoke Apocalypse, a karaoke competition where singers are backed by a live band:

I made it into the finals with an accordion-backed rendition of the Ramones’ I Wanna Be Sedated…

Three finalists were picked, and I was one of them. For my finals number, I did AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, and in the end, we were ranked by audience applause. I won second place!

The first place prize was a year’s worth of movie tickets courtesy of Fandango. As much as I would’ve liked this prize, they’re no go to me in Canada. So I’ll have to make do with the second-place prize:

…and iPad! The original version, not the 2.0 (I don’t mind, free cool tech is still free cool tech), 16GB wifi model. Not bad for eight minutes’ work!

This morning at 2 a.m., it became 3 a.m..  Daylight Saving Time starts today and runs until Sunday, November 6th. As is tradition on this blog, I’m posting what I consider to be the official photo of Daylight Saving Time.

Combined with the South by Southwest conference, which I’m attending as I write this, this “spring forward” business is a bit rough.

The Chuggin’ Monkey is an Austin 6th Street institution. I was introduced to it during my first South by Southwest conference back in 2008. During non-SxSW times, it’s a cheesy college bar specializing in inexpensive cocktails of the sort that are shot glasses of liquor “depth-charged” into larger glasses containing even more liquor. During SxSW times, it’s the same thing; it’s just that SxSW attendees displace the college students.

Austin fun trivia fact: An Austin local by the name of Brad Womack owns the Chuggin’ Monkey. Brad is better known for being the namesake bachelor from the 2007 season of the reality TV series The Bachelor.

I was walking down sixth street with my developer evangelist counterparts for the US, Abby and Kyle, when we heard some raucous music blaring from the Chuggin’ Monkey’s front windows. The Chuggin’ Monkey’s stage is right by the front windows, so it was easy for us to walk up and get a better look at who was playing. When Kyle and I discovered that it was an all-girl band wearing snug firefighter outfits, we decided that perhaps it would be a good idea to go inside and check out the show.

Here’s a taste of what we caught:

We soon found out that the band’s name was Guilty Pleasures, and they’re a fun-to-watch cover band. Among their covers were Bad Reputation, No Sleep Till Brooklyn, Call Me and Summer of ‘69 (which they dedicated to me after finding out I was Canadian).

Fun lifehack: Want to get an all-girl band who like to project a bi-curious image to interact with you? Bring an accordion, get their attention and lick it. Works every time.

I tweeted that I was watching Guilty Pleasures play. In response, Brittney Gilbert, whom I know only online, tweeted back, saying that she knows Kat, the vocalist. A quick “Hey, Kat! Brittney Gilbert says hi!” confirmed that. Kat said hi back, and I tweeted that back to Brittney.

For their second-to-last number, Kat wandered offstage and took a perch on the bar, not far from where I was. They started into the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army, which I know how to play (dirt simple: the basic chords are Em – C – B). I simply walked up to Kat, played those chords, and she let me solo for the better part of a minute, putting her vocal mike up to my accordion grill.

I know the Great Law of the Internet is “pics or it didn’t happen”. Luckily, Abby got some great shots:

And that, folks, is why I tend to take the accordion out as much as possible. It’s a device for converting music into adventure!

The Microsoft travel system found the nearest available hotel to South by Southwest for me – the Fairfield Marriott Suites on I-35 South –  is a good six miles away from the Austin Convention Centre and probably not even reachable on foot. Still, it’s a place to stay, which is hard to come by during this conference.

Thankfully, my friend from my Crazy Go Nuts University Days, Jodi Brown, is renting a house just off 11th Street, a shade over a mile from the convention – a longish walk and a quick cab ride away. It belongs to one Peter Staats, photographer, and it’s both awesome and rather unusual. She and her friends have taken the rooms in the house, but the coolest room (in my opinion) was left available: the “Quonset hut” in the backyard. It’s now my “hotel away from hotel”, and it’s featured in the video tour of the Staats house, shown above.

It’s a landmark, and I can’t but comment on the sign’s shape. (NSFW: Gordon Ramsay-esque mentions of male genitalia.)

I arrived in Austin on Wednesday afternoon and caught up with my friends Lee Dale, Matt Rintoul and Gabe Mansour of the Accordion City-based web/app design firm Say Yeah. Lee had his heart set on getting some cowboy boots, so we made tracks for what considered to Allen’s Boots in South Congress, which boasts an amazing collection of western clothing. In the video above, Lee is looking around for boots and hats, and as you might expect, some mild hilarity ensued.

Here’s just one of the aisles at Allen’s, which has a very nice collection of big-ass belt buckles, hats, shirts, bolo ties and of course, boots:

If you’re in Austin for South by Southwest and are looking for a break, you might just want to grab a cab from the convention center and check out Allen’s. It’s surrounded by a number of neat places worth visiting as well.

The South by Southwest (SxSW) conference may have started off as a music festival – and it still is; if you want to see up-and-coming bands before anyone else hears about them, this is the place – but it’s grown to include the film and interactive sections. I’ve been told that nowadays, the Interactive part of the conference is larger than Music and Film.

It was at SxSW that Twitter and later, Foursquare, exploded onto the scene, when A-list bloggers started making use of it to find each other and locate the happening parties. I’ve seen some of the best and most inspiring presentations at SxSW, from Kathy Sierra talking about creating apps so great that your users become passionate about them to the creator of the Post Secret talking about building a site that tugs at your heartstrings to Ben Huh explaining how I Can Haz Cheezburger got started, and handing out cheeseburgers to everyone in the audience at the end of the session. I watched the entertaining but cringeworthy keynote with Sarah Lacy interviewing Mark Zuckerburg during which they weren’t clicking. I’ve had amazing between-sessions conversations with developers, designers and “suits” about their projects, technologies that they were excited about and the industry in general. And yes, I may have attended a party of two.

While there’s a lot that you can learn online, there’s a reason the expression “you had to be there” exists. For all the world-shrinking tech that lets us send words, sounds, pictures and videos over great distances and lets us attend meetings just with a headset and webcam, there’s still no substitute for gathering together to tell stories, share ideas and even team up. That’s why we go to great expense to hold events like TechDays and AlignIT as well as smaller gatherings like hackathons and Coffee and Codes. As the “agilistas” will tell you, developing software is as much about talking to people as it is about talking to machines.

That’s one of the reasons I’m at South by Southwest for the next seven days. I’m there to catch up with some of the brightest lights in the world of interactive tech, hear what they have to say, pick their brains and share this knowledge with you. I’ll be filing reports from the conference, taking notes, pictures and video, so you can see what’s going on.

Whenever I can, I’ll also be sharing Canadian developers’ stories. SxSW is one of the big tech conferences, so many Canadian developers and startups make it a point to come here every year to make sure they’re on top of what’s going on in the industry, as well as to be seen and heard. If you have the time and the funds, I recommend coming down to SxSW and experiencing the sessions, the collective brainpower, the vibe, and yes, the partying. All work and no play makes you a dull developer, after all.

Finally, I’m here to help the Internet Explorer team promote the very-soon-to-be-final IE9. Here’s a browser that we can proudly say gives the best of both worlds: it’s as compliant as our very own nitpicky legal department (no more coding to quirks!) and thanks to hardware acceleration, it runs like snakes on ice. I’ll be checking in with the IE9 team, helping out at the Austin JavaScript Party on Sunday and talking to developers about the troika of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript and how IE9 supports it.

Keep an eye on this blog for my reports from South by Southwest! I promise you’ll be informed and entertained.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.