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What happened to my office?

I set up an office in a spare bedroom in my house when I got laid off at the end of February. It was nice and tidy, and it felt good. I even splurged on a $25 speaker phone so I could feel that much more professional while in my sweat pants. Over the next couple of weeks, things even stayed fairly organized, and now, look at this place!

In my defense, I’ve been extremely busy this week, what with South By Southwest Interactive , job interviews, and tweaks to the web site all going on at once. So let’s see – Monday and Tuesday was wall-to-wall SXSW, between preparing to go (printing flyers, determining where I wanted to be when, etc), the actual conference, and the after-parties. For those of you who attend these kinds of shindigs, you know that the parties are a major portion of the value of the event. It is at the parties when you meet the most amazing people, and learn of the coolest stuff that people are actually doing, or about to do, or theorizing about. It’s a very energetic and encouraging environment, and what, it’s over already? When’s the next one?

Of course, it’s my own fault I missed half the festival. Last summer, I got it in my head that I really wanted to go see Spamalot on Broadway. The trip itself would not be a problem – one of the perks of being a traveling professional services consultant is the airline miles and hotel points you rack up over time, not to mention that if you consistently use the Amex card enough, you can get Broadway tickets free as well. No, the problem was that every single performance of that show was completely sold out for the next 9 months, and yes, you guessed it, the first tickets I could get were for March 11th. It was a bit ironic, booking a spur-of-the-moment whim so far in the future, and who would have thunk it then that it would mean missing some excellent discussions on the state of the web? Oh well, life is the convergence of paths already chosen.

By the way, the show itself was fantastic. To get an idea of just one moment of silliness, picture a spoof of Lord of the Dance done with coconuts. You Monty Python fans know what I mean. Even my non-Monty wife, who formally wouldn’t have known a Black Knight from a Knight That Says Ni, thoroughly enjoyed the show.

Anyway, back in reality, on Wed I had two job interviews to go to, with all the attendant preparation involved, and there was a ton of things to follow up on from SXSW. Like, for example, adding my blog to blog promotion services I learned about, which meant seeing for the first time how my posts look when they come through an RSS feed, which then meant a mad scramble to fix all the problems I found (which I am very sure are all deadly sins in the blogosphere), such as coding relative paths to images! Ouch! Owww! Hey, that HURTS! Yes, I know I deserve to be flogged, but come on, have some pity on the first time blogger!

Thursday was spent on the unfortunate need to redo some code I thought I was done with, and I’ll post more on that later, but for now, I think I’ll take a break and try to straighten up a little. Of course, I’ve been thinking that for two days, but I mean it this time! Really! Only, where do I start? Maybe I should have lunch first….