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I recently spent two ridiculously fun weeks in Miami and Austin where I met The Internet.

I was in Miami for the Future of Web Apps. There's not much to be said there, other than we spent most of our time here...



...a place generally reserved for the type of people that frequent South Beach, and if you've ever been to South Beach or hell even heard of South Beach you know what I'm talking about. Now imagine a bunch of pasty white web nerds in the same place, attempting to play beach volleyball, drinking too much, and generally being awesome.

Then I spent some time in Key Largo with family, which isn't a bad place to spend some time.



From there I flew to Austin for SXSW Interactive. I won't go into huge detail about it because unless you're as super nerdy as I am you don't really care who I met and what I did. But to give you a general idea of what it was like I'll talk about the first night.

After the first day of panels, a bunch of folks decided to go climbing at the Austin Rock Gym. Afterwards we were looking for a way to get back into town, and no cabs would come to pick us up. So an enterprising individual decided to call the RVIP Lounge, and an epic journey was upon us.



When this RV showed up, with booze, food, and a karaoke machine, within minutes the music was playing, people were heating up Tillamook cheese to put on their nachos, other people were mixing drinks, and we were all riding around town in style.

To get a general idea of the atmosphere feel free to read about it in the LA Times or Valleywag (which has a particularly apt video of actual karaoking taking place).

So after a bit of that, the RVIP Lounge took us to the Enchanted Forest. The best way to describe this dystopic vision is a PG rated version of Burning Man.



We perused the installations for a bit, I rode a unicorn...



...and shopped for affordable housing ("it's not a cardboard house, it's a cardboard home").



Then huddled for warmth with bear helmets...



...and saw a show by a pretty good band that included a lightsaber. And if you've never heard a band play while someone swings a lightsaber around, then you're really missing out.



Afterwards we boarded the RVIP Lounge and partied some more...



...until it was time for bed.



Oh, and somewhere in there I rode an 80 foot snake bike.



So yeah, it was a lot of that.

Really though I met pretty much everyone I've ever wanted to meet, and a ton of people I didn't know I wanted to meet but I'm glad I did, and had a lot of moments where I just thought to myself, "hey, this is pretty neat". Ultimately I think Caitlin Hill's tweet said it best.