I'm incredibly tired. So dead, it's hard to take out my contact lenses (you know how they stick sometimes? Yeah, I hate that). Here's a log of today's events:
- 7:50am - Wake up at hotel in San Francisco, shower
- 8:45am - Catch cab to International Orange
- 9:15-10:45am - Take first ever Yoga class (wow - it's painful, and I'm the only male in the building) with Yoga instructor friend
- 11:00am - Catch cab back to hotel (why are there never any cabs in SF when you need them?)
- 11:45am - Check out of hotel and drive to Boulangerie for breakfast
- 12:45pm - Desperately lost in Sonoma County
- 1:15pm - Arrive at Skywalker Ranch (holy crap is it gorgeous!) with Jessie
- 1:15pm-4:00pm - Tour Skywalker Ranch (including seeing the grail from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and, weirdly, Jon Favreau, who's also giving someone a private tour)
- 4:00pm - Sara from Edutopia (George Lucas' Educational Nonprofit) gets me a replica Indiana Jones Hat (wow!)
- 4:30pm - Meet Jessie's horse in Marin County (I've never touched a horse before - at least that I can remember)
- 5:00-6:00pm - Get lost on multiple freeways and streets in and around Berkeley (why can't I figure out directions in the Bay Area?)
- 7:10pm - Arrive at SMX West Conferece
- 7:15pm - Accidentally call Matt Foster from ArteWorks SEO "Todd" - feel bashful for the rest of the night
- 7:30pm - Find out my dad is attending SMX Conference (he looks so dapper in a sportcoat) :)
- 7:45pm - Eat dinner with Will Critchlow from Distilled (we miss you desperately, Tom) and Miguel Salcido from eVisibility.
- 9:00-11:00pm - Drinks with Gary & Patrick from Ask.com. Gary, as usual, shows us that he is clearly a far better search engine than Google (not Ask.com, I mean Gary himself).
- 11:15pm - Run into Ken Jurina, but we both realize we need sleep even more than commiseration.
- 11:45pm - Bitch about social news sites with a brilliant programmer
- 12:00am - IM with Sarah Bird (who's arrived safely back from Spain - hooray!)
- 12:30am - Realize with horror that something has to go up on the blog tonight, despite pain in all sorts of body parts I didn't even realize I had
- 12:45am - Hope that Mystery Guest is having a great time in Italy, but miss her desperately
I'm a very, very lucky guy. I hope I can repay that gratitude in full someday.
Skywalker Ranch!?
Replica Indiana Jones hat!?
Jon Favreau giving personal tours!?
Why not me?
Let's compare to my day yesterday...
...that's all I can remember
BigTequila by name.....
;)
So why drink Bourbon? Why not Big Bourbon then?
make that a souble bourbon please
Hey Rand - Call me Todd, Tony, or Tabitha, if I get link love every time! Thanks!
And no worries my friend it was a long day for everyone!
Matt Foster
Dinner was fun - the whole evening was cool (if a little crazy). I hope I made some coherent conversation through the sleep deprivation. It's only going to get worse today given that we got about 4 hours' sleep last night before the London timezone over-rode the desire for sleep at 5.30am this morning.
i'm not so sure i'd call that a day of pure insanity, maybe a day of pure coolness. yeah, rand you've got it real tough. :)
hear, hear
No offense, Rand, but any day that involves a trip to Skywalker Ranch is one where I'm going to have a hard time feeling sorry for you :)
I just took a 90-minute restorative yoga class. To me, "restorative" evokes massages and sipping margartias on the beach. To them, it apparently meant holding incredibly painful poses for 5 minutes at a time and hanging upside down from straps.
Hey! I never said you should feel sorry for me. That must be why all the thumbs down are appearing :(
I never thumbs-down for jealousy; I prefer quietly seething and occasionally muttering under my breath ;)
And heavy breathing too Pete? That would explain the phone calls recently.... ;-)
That's not jealousy, Tom. That's just because you're so damned sexy. My wife is starting to ask me about those international calls, though :)
This rivalry has officially veered into "creepy" territory.
Wrong Critchlow. It's Will who has the rivalry with Pete... but the lines are starting the blur...
Everything's delegated to Tom while we are at SMX, even the rivalry ;)
Okay, this is weird.
Jealousy is an ugly thing, Rand.
Thumbs up from me to counteract those bitter souls.
I don't feel sorry for you. I think you need to work harder! (MWA HAHAHAHAHA)
We're going to be doing all nighter / all dayer combos at SMX advanced. I've never been so excited in my life!
Don't feel too bad for me guys, I'm having a great time back here in London.....in the rain......and the dark....and the cold.....
Hope you caught some sleep Rand :-)
Its not been that bad Tom... we seem to be getting more sunshine than summer last year... ;)
I was going to say, come over when we have bad weather!
@Rishil - I'm not sure that's saying much though!! Last summer most of the country was flooded!
lol true...funny how London can come to standstill with a bit of bad weather... I still remember the ONE day of snow a few years back when I was forced to treck 20 miles home from the city cause all transport was gridlocked...
You know you're British when you complain about the 2 or 3 days each year when we get some really bad weather! We don't get hurricanes much, or tornadoes, sandstorms, icestorms, typhoons (although we are reknowned for our Typhoo), swarms of locusts, massivley subzero temperatures, or months of temperatures repeatedly over 100 deg F. We get a bunch of wet leaves, some half-assed wind or a bit of snow and all transport stops, people don't go into work and it's remembered for years afterwards.
We do get lots of flooding, and that's a bad thing, but our little island really doesn't have it half bad.
I'd hate to see how London would cope with a sandstorm!
We do too get tornados! They're just a bit more polite than their American cousins!
Rand - hope you have a good show; please say hi to all teh team and tell Will that we all hate him.
;)
Of course, even your tornados are sophisticated and well-mannered while ours are rowdy and unrefined.
Exactly!
Either that or it's something to do with the fact that the size of our country means that the tornados don't have the necessary factors to really build up speed. But I prefer the first explanation!
That's some fancy talk there, Professor Science, but I'm going with my gut on this one. I refuse to consider any cointerpoints or empirical data - because that's just how we do things on this side of the pond.
Look - we get earthquakes and everything!
Why am I proud about natural disaters? I have no idea...
My bloody TV fell - what a nightmare... thats what happens when you arent prpared for your whole house shaking... until I saw the morning news, I honestly thought it was a really larg truck passing through the road that caused the vibrations... doh!
Not impressed. I'm from Wellington ;)
Wellington - a place so exciting they named it after a popular form of footwear...
That or a famous British general, one or the other...
Both Wellington NZ and the Wellington Boot are named after the British general and Prime Minister, who took the name Wellington himself from a town in Somerset.
The boots were of his design, but one can only imagine that the NZ town took his name solely because someone there though that he was rather smashing.
We had to do quite a lot of military history at Sandhurst ;¬)
We did quite a lot at my grotty old comp as well - I wasn't really suggesting..., anyway.
TOTALLY off-topic, just read this rather good book if you're 'into' Wellington (so to speak).
is it me or has this side thread hijacked the post?
Arrived at this conversation late; have no idea what's going on.
...yeah, neither do I, actually.
Gee, that doesn't stop you from rocking like a hurricane, does it? Now tell the Pom something about how our tornadoes helped his tornadoes in The War or something like that. hahahahhaaaa...
I think you'll find that our Tornados were built to help yours..
;)
(PS - sorry about the wiki link Rand!)
@ Jane: um I think Tom mentioned the bad weather in the UK, and then I kind of mentijned the way UK isnt prepared for bad weather...and seemed to have snowballed (*grin* excuse the pun) from there...
London had fab weather all last week, it's only seemed to go badly wrong the day after I left.
Usually I cop it all the other way round.
K, rule #1: He who visits Skywalker Ranch may not complain about anything else that day. :)
Miguel (Serch Junkie) - thanks for organizing a fun dinner....
...Rebecca - you have inspired me -- I am going to run in the 2015 San Diego marathon!
Thanks guys...
I will put money on it that you do not make it! Even with years of training.
$100 dollars!
Good stuff! I'll run it with you. :)
2015 is a long time away...try sticking to a few new year's solutions before making such long-term commitments!
Sorry, accidentally double posted, how can one delete one's mistake? Editing just allows one to edit the comment, not delete it as such.
haha! First Yoga class? Give it 24-48 hours then you will really start to feel sore. But trust me, if you go once a week, within three weeks you'll be amazed at how limber you've become.
Then go look up a Bikram Yoga class :)
The eVisibility team and I (Miguel) had a great time and it was nice to sit down and break bread (and wine) with fellow Internet marketing nerds.
I didn't WANT to Thumbs Up you because of the snot-running, crying child on my lap.
But SHE did, only because she freakin' loves Indiana Jones. She even loved Will Critchlow, and she's only 1!
Have fun dude, and follow BigTequila and score some bourbon. Nothing helps out a conference week like bourbon.
you were the only dude in yoga class, seriously? sounds unusual.
Ha. I mixed up Dave Davis and Colin Cochrane at SES (same hairstyle on both), as well as Andy Beal and Andy Beard (misheard the introduction).
I know how you feel...
And I though I had a rough day.
Good luck with the conference Rand!
You have been keyword stuffing your day!
Wow! No wonder you lose weight while conferencing!
Have a fab time and send some chocolate love to everyone there (the nice kind... not Hershey's). I was liking the M&M love at PubCon - you gotta keep that vibe going!
Seriously, the M&M's were good. We're still working on the huge bag Gillian gave me to bring back because I didn't bring my staff to the conference. Doesn't give me much motivation to bring the staff along next year, does it...
Get lost on multiple freeways and streets in and around Berkeley (why can't I figure out directions in the Bay Area?)
I lived there for ten years and still managed to get lost often so it's not just you Rand.....
Too tired to do a blog post......Write a blog post about why you're so tired....Brilliant!!
;)
It was great to Meet the Mozzers, The Team from Portent Interactive, and of course Will at dinner (I know I am missing a few).
You will definitely be seeing me around :)
12:45am - Hope that Mystery Guest is having a great time in Italy, but miss her desperately
AWWWWWWWWW.......