Man, I feel like crap tonight. I guess it’s good that I wasn’t sick at SXSW, but I think it hit me today. It’s just a cold, I hope, but it needs to go away before Friday. Ryan and I are going to Disney World, and then I’ll be covering CTIA for work until Wednesday. Should be fun, but no traveling is fun when you’re sick.

Anyway, I’m happy to be home from Austin. SXSW had it’s ups and downs, but I’m not sure that our audience is really into the things that were covered there, at least not the people that are on CNET TV. Maybe they’re more gadget-oriented, and SXSW Interactive is more… bloggey? Web 2.0? Too industry? I don’t know. And the music stuff didn’t really seem to strike a chord (You like that? Heh!) with people either. Well, it was a good experiment, but maybe next year I’ll just go check out the panels.

I spent the night making TivoToGo work on the MacBook Pro, and trying to figure how to make Nabaztag connect to the WiFi again. But for now, I’m going to eat these Oreos, drink some WalFlu, watch more back episodes of AskANinja and call it a night.

Oh, Ryan and I have been talking for a while now about doing a podcast together… I’m guessing the subject matter would probably center around, oh I don’t know, technology, but if anyone has any ideas let me know!

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I’ve been here a few days now, and it’s been a lot of work — but still exciting. The Dan Rather keynote yesterday was interesting (journalists should be “watchdogs, not lapdogs”) and Chris and I spent most of the day taping and editing.

No sense in talking about the parties too much, as they’re all very… similar. But it was fun to hang out with Tantek, Jasmine, Nicole, and everyone else. I’m staying in tonight, I think. Too tired, the rain will not relent, and I’ve got stuff to work on. More soon! Oh, check out this photo of me and Nicole, we’re doing our best “emo kid” faces.

photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Also, I’m entering this in the Vloggies SXSW video challenge. Woohoo!

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Last Saturday night was Wii Fight Club, and there are four rules:
1. Don’t blog about Wii fight
2. Do NOT blog about Wii fight
3. No Twitter
4. No Dodgeball

Well, I broke three out of four… kind of. In any event, I kicked Ryan’s butt, so it was all worth it! See my victory interview on Geek Entertainment TV’s video of the event, seen above. Hopefully they’ll invite me back after this blog post.

More photos by Scott Beale from Laughing Squid, seen here on Flickr.

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Today I went with News.com to visit Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic. Like I mentioned in my last post, this was an incredible chance to meet people who’ve created and worked on some of my favorite movies, including Willow, Star Trek (First Contact and Generations), Jurassic Park, Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars… need I go on? I was honored to meet Hal Hickle (Animation Supervisor) and John Knoll (Visual Effects Supervisor) who are both Oscar-nominated for their work on Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest. They’re in crunch time right now working on the third movie, which is due at the end of spring. But that’s not all! I also met Michael Sanders, who showed me the ins and outs of the motion capture process (see pajamas here). I’m hoping sometime I can get back in there and actually try making an animation myself!

Well, as you can see I took a lot of photos. Daniel Terdiman, who’ll be writing up the articles for News.com, also took about 200 pictures. I’ll link to those image galleries and my own videos when they’re published.

UPDATE:
Photo Gallery: In the shadow of ‘Star Wars’
Photo Gallery: The magic behind ILM
News Story: Visual effects masters put the magic in ILM

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