This Friday will be my first time at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW). I’ve been to a couple other conferences but this is by far the largest. It looks like it’s going to be a blast in Austin. Insane amounts of great music, warm weather, parties, bbq, and getting to meet some of the top designers and digital creatives. It looks like it will be a bit of a sensory overload, but I’ve found a few links that may help you plan / get psyched for this event.

Schedule your panels AND parties
Sched.org is probably the most helpful resource you’ll find for planning your SXSW. It comes set up with every panel and party for the whole week. You mouse over to read the description and select the checkmark if you want to put it on your calendar. At the end you can access your list at a custom URL or download it all to an ical folder. This is a really awesome site.

Where to eat
A great thread listing places to eat over at Chowhound. One place that keeps popping up is Casino El Camino. I’ll definitely have to stop by for a burger.

Get a map
A great easy to read map of downtown Austin can be found at downtownaustin.org (pdf download). Great for locating things, though I hear 6th street is kind of the epicenter of everything, so you might not really need a map as long as you can get there.

Listen to music
Get into the frenzy by listening to free SXSW music through the SXSW Player. The bands you hear on there will probably be walking around while you’re there.

Other Austin stuff
Time to explore the city will probably be a little scarce with all the stuff going on downtown, but a here’s a pretty good travel guide for Austin.

And of course, don’t forget to set up a Twitter account and hook it up to your phone.

So it looks like my high school band, Ipacak, has finally thrown in the towel.  I was the lead guitarist of the band for 4 years and it was a pretty good run with two albums released and a battle of the bands win under our belts.
As a result, I’ve posted the songs from my band’s two albums to my music page.  The Ipacak songs are further down below my personal recordings.  I did all the sound recording and mixing for these songs.  Enjoy!

PS. Talking about music, here’s a link to my college a cappella group, Joyful Noise.  Recordings from when I was in there aren’t up yet, but they have some older albums on the site.