Good times

I had a busy morning today, starting with my first appearance at KC Coffee Morning — hopefully not my last. It was fun to meet the people behind the blogs and listen to creatives crack jokes.

Once I was sufficiently caffeinated with a JP’s dark roast, I buzzed over to the Kansas City Art Institute where Dean and I gave a little presentation to Tyler’s Senior Graphic Design class. I hope everyone enjoyed the presentation — the students were really engaged and asked some great questions.

As promised, I’ll post a few of my favorite links and I’ll work on a follow-up post with advice for the soon-to-be job seekers…

Continue reading “Good times”

SXSW: done.

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Today was the last day of SXSW. Dean and I had enough time to squeeze in a session and a half this morning before we had to ditch and catch the plane.

I sat in on Customer Service is the New Marketing, a great session on how companies like Zappos and Flickr are going above and beyond to delight their customers. Great stuff that I hope to bring back to work. I got a chance to say hi to Heather from Flickr. Met Steven — who’s the Director of Product Management at Netflix — and let him know what I think of the company (all good stuff). I also ran into (and heaped some praise on) Ryan Carson, creator of DropSend, my favorite little email app for big packages.

Design Aesthetic of the Indie Developer was the last session of the day. I met Kevin Cornell and (I think) I had my eardrum blown out by Dan Mall, who was showing his love for Inman.

All in all a good day, slightly offset by our unexpected 6 hour stay in the Austin airport. A big ol’ storm in Texas put the breaks on all the flights in Dallas. We were supposed to land in KC around 5 — we hit the runway around 10:30. It’s good to be home.

SXSW!

SXSW Interactive is drawing near. Dean and I will southbound on the 9th representing the Big G. My calendar is double and triple booked — too many interesting panels (and parties) to choose from. I’m really looking forward to meeting a lot of talented people, getting rid of all of my moo cards, and scouting for talent. We have quite a few web spots open at work, so if you’re looking for a job in Sausalito CA or Olathe KS, track me down.

In other news, Dean, Marcus and I met some nice folks from Adobe and Studio B Films last week, and there’s tons of video to prove it. Here’s the story: I handed a business card to an Adobe PR rep at Macworld 2006. Fast forward a year, and I get a CS3 beta invite followed by an invite to appear in an Adobe video talking about how they help us GTD. I figured they would show up with a couple of people and a hand held camera. Wrong. A whole crew with a truck full of lights and cameras and a full day of shooting. Crazy. We’ll see how it turned out later this month.