SXSW 2010: The Food

One of the things I was most looking forward to attending South by Southwest for was FOOD! I had such a long list of BBQ, Tex Mex and other awesome cuisine to try that I feel like I hardly made a dent. Though I will definitely be hitting the gym for weeks because of all I did try.

One of the first foods I had to seek out once landing in Austin was Chili! I’m a huge chili enthusiast and near the top of my list of must-try places was the Texas Chili Parlor. I had to try an authentic “bowl of red” the official food of the state of Texas. This place did not disappoint! Their chili is amazing and the atmosphere is original and not-to-be-missed. I liked the XX chili the best but also tried the black bean and sausage and habanero, both are delicious.

One of the second foods I had to seek out was queso. I’d heard a lot about queso and chips, mainly that we don’t have it in California, which is true. I tried it in several places. None really blew me away but the best was at the Oasis overlooking lake Travis. This is a beautiful location, I highly recommend it. While there I tried their puerco pibil quesadilla. I’ve always wanted to try puerco pibil ever since director Robert Rodriguez included a “10 min. cooking school” teaching how to make it on the DVD of Once Upon a Time in Mexico. It’s the dish Johnny Depp orders in that movie. It is truly amazing!!

During SXSW we ate at several excellent places on the famous 6th street: The Iron Cactus, Old Pecan St. Cafe, Jackalope, Death Metal Pizza, Daddy’s, but the place that stood out the most to me was Habana. They have excellent mariquitas. But if you’re into cuban food and in a hurry, you can’t beat the MMMpanadas empanada truck! This was a pleasant discovery I made through twitter. They have awesome gourmet empanadas, everything from savory like green chili chicken to sweet ones like smores!

As far as BBQ is concerned I was a bit underwhelmed. I guess we have pretty good barbque here in California. I tried several places including The County Line, but the place I really wanted to try was The Salt Lick. I didn’t get to make it out to their location but I tried their BBQ at the airport. Their sauce is great, sort of a sweet and spicy mustard based sauce. Hamburgers may not count as BBQ but I had to make a stop in at Mighty Fine which was a stone’s throw away from my hotel. They rival In-N-Out’s burgers but aren’t quite up to that level.

Of course, one of the goals of the trip was to not only see a movie at the famous Alamo Drafthouse but to also eat dinner during the movie! I saw many films at both the Drafthouse South Lamar and the Ritz on 6th street and made it a point at almost every movie to order something off the menu. Everything I tried at the Drafthouse was good, but their milkshakes are the best I’ve ever had in my life! They are unbelievably light and creamy and topped with candy coated sunflower seeds. They’re inspired by the movie Pulp Fiction and are definitely worth $5!

SXSW 2010 Overview

I just got back from Austin, TX where I attended South by Southwest 2010. I have been wanting to attend SXSW ever since I learned about the festival years ago. Austin and SXSW is like an amalgamation of all the things I love: Films, Internet, Food, Music, Culture, Travel… The list goes on. One of my favorite websites, aintitcool.com, is based out of Austin, and it’s partly because of that site that one of my items on my list of things to do before I die was see a movie at the Alamo Drafthouse. So if I could pick one film festival to ever go to, this is it. I attended the Film and Interactive parts of the festival, however, Austin is the “live music capital of the world” so you don’t really need to attend the music part to experience it. I’ll post my thoughts on Interactive, Films and Food shortly.

bhind u

This was way too funny not to share. Even if you don’t play MW2 you can appreciate this.

Apollo 11 Anniversary

Australia Trip and Maintenance

I came back from a 2 week vacation in Australia to find my sites hacked with spam link injection yet again. If I had the time or inclination I would redo this site in Expression Engine, but i don’t. So I’m trying some more extreme measures to keep my site from getting hacked. So you’ll notice things a bit different around here..

Anyhow, I was playing around with iWeb because 1) it’s on my computer which means 2) I paid for it in some way or another (even it it came for ‘free’ on my mac) so I made a cheesy click-and-build, drag-n-drop photo gallery of my pics just for the heck of it. Find it here.

Star Trek Sucked

This video was literally what was going through my head as I watched this film. Only there is much much more to the similarities than this:

Wolfram Alpha Poised to Kill Search?

This week a new website launched called Wolfram Alpha. At first glance you may assume it’s another search engine but you’d be wrong, it’s described as a “knowledge engine” and some are saying that it could kill search engines or at least searching as we know it. Here’s a very impressive video of what you can do with it:

Click here (note: Doesn’t seem to work in Firefox)

It’s all very impressive from a computer science point of view, the fact that it is even possible is amazing. This could become the “go-to” tool for online users who want to answer questions or are doing research. If what you’re looking for is knowledge based and you can form it into a question that can be answered, chances are this offers a much better experience than google.

Some website content owners are already calling foul. They, of course, want people to visit their websites for the information and not have some artificial intelligence that scours the internet and compiles all the data. But as you can imagine Wolfram Alpha is very secretive about how it actually all works.

But Don’t Take My Word For It

This made me smile today.

3 Min. Guitar Solo

OK, this seriously made me LOL:

A Lesson in Generational Marketing Missteps

Hey, remember OK Soda? Yeah, me neither. Ironically OK Soda was Coka Cola’s attempt to “market aggresively” to my generation (generation X) in the mid-90′s. You can read a lot more about OK Soda in it’s wikipedia entry. The story of OK Soda reads like a how-not-to case study for generational marketing.

“OK Soda was intentionally marketed at the difficult Generation X and Generation Y markets, and attempted to cash in on the group’s existing disillusionment and disaffection with standard advertising campaigns; the concept was that the youth market was already aware that they were being manipulated by mass-media marketing, so this advertising campaign would just be more transparent about it.”

Coke basically distilled an entire generation down to a series of stereotypes and created a product around that and it fell flat. This got me very curious, what insights did Coke’s marketing team have about Generation X? You can gleam some of it in their product’s “manifesto”:

1. What’s the point of OK? Well, what’s the point of anything?
2. OK Soda emphatically rejects anything that is not OK, and fully supports anything that is.
3. The better you understand something, the more OK it turns out to be.
4. OK Soda says, “Don’t be fooled into thinking there has to be a reason for everything.”
5. OK Soda reveals the surprising truth about people and situations.
6. OK Soda does not subscribe to any religion, or endorse any political party, or do anything other than feel OK.
7. There is no real secret to feeling OK.
8. OK Soda may be the preferred drink of other people such as yourself.
9. Never overestimate the remarkable abilities of “OK” brand soda.
10. Please wake up every morning knowing that things are going to be OK.

Pretty heavy handed I would say. Personally as a gen-x soda drinker I’m pretty underwhelmed by a product called “OK”, why not call it “Mediocre” or just “Meh”. But I think the real reason it failed was its suspicious use of unnecessary quotation marks in the tag line on the can: A carbonated “beverage”. I’m not drinking anything that can only loosely be called a “beverage”.