End of Silence

From Jeremy Keith’s Flickr photo stream.

After much debate and wringing of hands, we’re going to have a meetup on Monday night. As many people have pointed out, plans tend to fall apart during SXSW so we’re going with the flow.

Let’s meet at Nuclear Taco Night in Brush Square Park (Neches between 4th and 5th) at 6pm. If it’s crowded, we can move on. If we feel the need to move for no reason at all, we can move somewhere else. There’s a party at Sidebar for Lifehacker only a few blocks away. The EFF-Austin Steampunk party is at Scholz’s, several blocks (13) to the north. There’s a Mozilla/Democracy Player party in Brush Square Park as well. There’s a Creative Commons party. We’ll find something to do.

I’ll be wearing a bright red Metroblogging shirt and I’m 6’5″. I should be easy to spot. I’ll be running around SXSWi all day Monday, so grab me.

We’ll stay at least until 6:30 before moving on, so don’t be late. If you think you’ll show, e-mail me at my gmail account, my username is my first initial and last name (take that, you dirty spambots). I’ve got the same username on Dodgeball and Twitter. I’ll check in with both when we move on.

For all you out-of-towners coming to Austin from cities where the public transportation system is widespread, you’re in for a shock. Texans love their cars. That being said, Capital Metro is doing several things that are useful for SXSW attendees without cars, so I thought I’d pass them along.

Some of the highlights are:

• Ride from the airport to the convention center or your hotel for just 50 cents on the Airport Flyer.
• Save your cab cash for popcorn and beverages by taking Route 3 to SXSW film theaters.
• Park & Ride free to the Free Dew Concerts at Auditorium Shores March 15 – 17.
• $1 day passes are available for purchase on board buses and provide unlimited use of trips for an entire day.
• Ride the free Dillo service. The `Dillos operate north to south between 23rd Street and Oltorf Road, and east to west from near MoPac at Lake Austin Boulevard to Pleasant Valley Road.

SXSW Baby points out that Capital Metro has become part of the Google Transit Trip Planner.

I also heard on KUT this morning about a new service called Dadnab that lets you text your location and get the nearest bus that will take you to your destination.

For example, you can text “5th & lavaca to barton springs & kinney” to austin [at] dadnab.com (You’d type it like an e-mail address with the at symbol and no spaces. I’m just trying to avoid them getting spammed because of this post.) and get back “W 5TH ST & LAVACA ST to BARTON SPRINGS RD & KINNEY AVE/depart COLORADO & 5TH at 02:00 PM/29-SB/arrive BARTON SPRINGS & JESSIE at 02:08 PM”. Their site has more information on how to use the service. Pretty sweet.

Just to show that we’re not all about SXSW over the next couple of weeks, there are two notable events this weekend in Austin unrelated to SXSW.

First, the second Apple store will open at The Domain in north Austin on Friday at 10am. Dave Thorup trekked out there and took some photos yesterday of the final preparations.

Second, Dennis Kucinich will be in town on Saturday to campaign for another presidential bid. Dennis doesn’t have much of a chance, but you’ve got to give him credit for being against the Iraq war from the beginning. He’ll be right downtown amongst all of the SXSWi geeks (including me), so you might have a hard time spotting him.

Update: According to our Seattle Metblog, Starbucks will be giving away free coffee on Thursday, March 15, a little help with that hangover from Wednesday night.

DoneWaiting posted a bunch of day party lineups overnight.

Most notably:

• Melvins on 3/15 and Ghostface Killah & Rakim on 3/17 at Stubbs. RSVP here
• LongBranch Inn day shows including David Yow’s band Qui and Turbonegro on Friday 3/16 (at the same time as POTUS at Headhunter’s, damn).

Update: Even better, Austin360 / The Statesman has a huge listing of the day parties. As they point out, most of these don’t require that you have a wristband.