Sunday, March 1st.
Come by and say hi. I’ll be showing for the first time my new line of neckwarmers.

Panel: Keynote with Mark Zuckerberg
My notes: “Sucked”
All I remember from this talk was Zuckerberg saying “platform, efficient, community” and Lacy just crossing and uncrossing her legs while twirling her hair. I left 15 minutes before the end. Apparently, the crowd went a bit crazy when it was Q&A time towards the end. The best part was when it as mob rule and they gave her a lashing. Ah well.

Panel: Human Rights in Virtual Worlds: discussion about whether or not you own what you make in a virtual game
- there is no such thing as group rights as of now. There’s still work being done for individual rights online
- ULAs (User Licence Agreements) are not always as liberal as marketed

Should you own what you make? If it’s on their server, perhaps it doesn’t fall into “your” possession. Curious what the gamers in the audience think of this one.

Panel: Icanhascheezburger
We were promised free burgers. While we were inside the room, passersby ate our burgers :( I still can’t believe the company staffs 9 full time employees – all off ad-based revenue from funny cat pictures!

Sunday was the most partied out night of all of them. Went to a pre-party for the Adobe Web Awards. Then the awards show hosted by Eugene Mirman. Lots of laughs. The ‘ask a ninja’ guy came out to receive awards for participants not present. Went to the Etsy/Threadless/Moo party – which sucked. It was crowded, hot and no movement space since there were 3 pool tables with active games going on at the time. Gawker party at Emo’s: Met John Coulton who sings “Code Monkey”. Bumped into Eugene Mirman there who let us know of his comedy show the following night. Then went to Blogger party and met Cheeseburger from Icanhascheezburger. Partied hard.

Most memorable moment at the Blogger party: Met an Irishman and asked where I should go when I visit Ireland some day. Instead of the usual way of making a list, he drew out an accurate map of Ireland’s coastline and pin pointed the cities I should see. I love the geek way and not the ‘normal’ way :)

I don’t want to bore you with all the details and I’m sure you can find long, well written explanations of the panels on professional blogs. Here, I’ll just note what I found interesting from the ones I attended.

In true slacker fashion, I will write up the first day. More to come.

Panel: Horrible Ads: A panel with Jeff Jarvis and others discussing last year’s worst advertising campaigns
- Rules #101 : When making an ad, make sure your audience can remember your brand name
- Don’t mess with Wikipedia because you will be found out
- Don’t make up socialibility where it doesn’t exist (The Cisco “human networking” example)
- Vespa: Started a blog and let it die after a few entries. If you start it, finish it!
- Whole Foods CEO: Don’t lie about your competition
- Whatever you do, don’t insult your audience’s intelligence

Panel: Steven Johnson & Henry Jenkins: An optimistic view on collective intelligence
- How is it that people find the time and devotion to fan sites?
- Most pink collar workers need high levels of expertise to get the job. Once they have it, they are only required to use a small portion of their knowledge at work. They then seek out respect and a reputation outside of the office – this is possible in an online space. Hence, the motivation for hours spent creating online communities
- Harry Potter has enabled kids to seek out larger text to read as well as learn about the legal process and fair trade when they try to publish their own works.
- There’s a shift from “I” to “We”
- A large reason why Barack Obama is popular amongst younger voters: he is the stub in the Wikipedia entry and we are all filling out the entry together (interesting wording that caught my attention)

Panel: Voting
- “miracle of aggregation”
- In a betting market, there is a cost to be wrong. If there’s something at stake, does a voter with a ‘wrong’ vote stay quiet?
- If you don’t know enough about a subject, don’t vote! (brings up the question of how informed are we as a society about the current issues and our presidential candidates’ take on them)

Panel: Worst. Website. Ever: A complete riot. Some of the most hilarious moments at SXSW. Loved it.
- What makes a horrible website? It is: Inane. Derivative. Evil.
(derivative example: Facebook for Senior Citizens. Threadless for Pants – Pantless)
Sites presented: Presca.st, Flockd Up, HappyNetBox, Sickr, Mmomerce, PeopleIPO.

After this, we’d gone to Spaghetti warehouse. Because where do you eat the best Italian food? In Texas, of course. And how do you know it’s the best? Your food has a tiny plastic Italian flag on it to remind you of the cuisine in case you’d forgotten.

Good times on 6th street afterwards. Got a cowgirl hat. :)

In any case, it seems that SXSW is following me even at the entrance of my workplace. I walked out this morning to get some late morning coffee and I see two girls handing out fliers for Animoto. I had seen their presentation at SXSW’s Trade Show. I grabbed a few dozen fliers of theirs and decided to join the site. Here’s my little experiment -

It’s not a bad process. Takes about 15 minutes total and is much quicker if you have your photos hosted on Flickr or another hosting site. I may use it later in the future. If you make your own slideshow, let me know. Mine was kinda a starter :)

It’s too bad this post is significant in number and yet the content isn’t all too eventful.

Some things of note:
- New blog look! I’ve *finally* integrated my blog with the new site look.. and you can even now navigate through the incomplete (not launched) site. You may notice it’s located at craftic.com/mb which is where I’m temporarily hosting my files until I finish everything and move it over to mellowbeing.com. All in due time.. (or rather, I’m aiming for Nov 1st launch date. 2 days before my birthday! whoohoo!)

- I’m off to MAKER FAIRE!! I will be in Austin, TX. Hellz yeah! I may be bringing back some cowboy stuff.. like a cowgirl hat, some boots and maybe an actual cowboy ;)

I seriously need to stop procrastinating and start packing for it.. bringing my camera, laptop, sunblock (it’s 90 there now.. how crazy..) aaaand business cards because you just never know.

Will post a ton of pictures when I get back. This blog has been photo-less for a while now so it’s time to remedy that.

See ya soon!

Now the Fall semester is upon me – it is starting up tomorrow. It’s my last year of grad school and as much as I’d like to say that I’ve taken grad school seriously these past two years, I really haven’t given it my all. It seems that it’s always easier to take the simpler route and kind of skim the surface on things. This being the last year of my academic studies for a while, I figure I should completely put all my effort into it and not do it half-assed, pardon my French ;) I think that perhaps sometime down the road, I will either get another Masters or a PhD but I know I definitely need a break before I start up another degree.

My biggest concern is that once the year is over, I will be graduating and as much as I should know by now, I don’t actually have a clear idea of what I’d like to do the next several years after graduation. As much as I love crafting, it’s not my true calling and I don’t intend to do it as a side business for much longer. Trust me, you will see *plenty* of new items popping up in the shop in the next few months. I’ve created quite a bit this summer in times of stress and I always look forward to a few hours of mindless knitting after having a hard day and having too many other thoughts that I’m trying to clear. I’ve had quite a bit of fun coming up with cool color combinations, finding cute buttons to match things and meeting the nicest people along the way :) You’ve no idea how your friendship has helped me get through some difficult times this past year and even though I won’t go into details, I want to say Thanks to everyone who’s been reading and been so wonderful.

I also want to take up reading again – funny to say that. I used to be a huge bookworm as a kid and all throughout my undergraduate years but now with reading the newspaper in the morning and taking up the rest of the time to knit, I feel like I’ve lost my way. I used to imagine being able to walk in Barnes & Noble and saying I’ve read an entire bookshelf but with the way it’s going, it’ll be surprising if I have read as much as one set of books in the entire store. I have this massive “History of the World” book I bought a long time ago and I haven’t cracked the cover. Isn’t that sad? I don’t like having abandoned books.

Anywho, I will be finishing up mellowbeing.com in the upcoming weeks and set everything up to make a more official store front. I always dreamed of creating my own crafty business when I was a child and I can now say that I’ve really done that and it’s something more to check off my “what to do before 30″ list. I can see this year being the height of that and I will try my best to pull off providing good service and maybe even some new items. There are also several personal projects I want to work on such as the infamous laptop sleeve I keep talking about but am only a third way done. So much to do, so little time! And there are still ideas brewing up in my head such as new brooches for shop. Hah.. but I need to stop before driving myself to complete madness.

This feels like a long letter somehow but I suppose that’s what a blog entry is, a personal message from writer to reader. I just thought I’d throw out there how things are going and perhaps why I’ve taken a bit of an absence from the blogging. If you’re still reading up to this point, you’re very brave :)

Oh btw, I’m will be at the Artists & Fleas today from 12pm to 8pm. If youre in the Williamsburg area, stop by. Not sure when/if I’ll do another show so yeah, come on by!

If you’ll be in the Philadelphia area this Saturday, make a stop by the 40th Street Summer Series’ Alternative Craft & Art Fair! This will be the BIG finale to the summer series so expect lots of good things such as food, poetry readings, face painting and more.

Yours truly will be showing off her latest wristwarmers, pins, cozies, notecards and maybe even brooches.. sharing a booth with Haasome and her adorable pouches, aprons, wallets and I’ve heard – wristlets! So stop by and say hello :) If you mention that you read this blog entry, then maybe you’ll get a little freebie ;)

I think there are still openings for artists – it’s a bit last minute but totally worth it. We were at the Brooklyn one a few months ago and it was a good time for all.

Stay mellow,
Jen

Welp, I just wanted to share some photos with you from the events. The following is the black Etsy bag all the partiers got with goodies inside. I, being the klutz that I am, left mine in the taxi cab while traveling from that party to a friend’s birthday party. While at Renegade Craft Fair, the Etsy crew was nice enough to give me another one :D

The party was awesome. We (Haasome, Kat, our friend Chris and I) had some pizza, Brooklyn lager and were too full to venture out and eat some cake. There was also a pinata broken which my friend Kat was brave enough to go see and bring back goodies. We chatted with Haim, one of the Etsy admins, and had some good laughs.

The necklace in the picture is from Imogene, whose booth I visited at Renegade Fair. It has become of my favorite pieces of jewelry – vintage key on brass necklace, it’s so purdy :)

While at Renegade, Haasome and I stopped by the Adorn Magazine booth as we were about to leave. We figured, hey, why not and sign up for their raffle since it’s happening in 15 minutes anyway? Well I was very lucky to be one of the 20 something winners. Eee! I, of course, needed more yarn.. (sarcasm goes here). Hehe, but I can’t complain. I love the colors and they’re perfect for winter knitting since they’re wool yarns. I had been meaning to get some fabric glue and some bigger knitting needles so I’m so glad to have gotten this goodie bag! There’s a hole puncher, a book on crochet scarves, ribbons and a few other things. Pretty sweet, eh?

The day went really well. I shared a space with Jessica from Haasome Goods and my good friend Ben stuck around from the time we set up til the time we left the show (approximately 10 hrs.. 4pm til 1am). You can see us below with our goofiest expressions in this picture that Fort Cloudy took of our little trio:

Several friends came by to show their support. One of my friends even brought her mom – they ended up buying phone cozies for themselves and some flowery buttons to put on their blazer’s lapels. I hadn’t thought of that before so I think I will start wearing my infamous pink flower pin on my brown corduroy jacket… it’ll look cute and even do some self-promoting. :) Here’s myself and Yuliya posing for the camera, looking hawt:

Anywho, I did manage to sell several pins.. to people I don’t know.. hah.. but the wristwarmers and cozies didn’t get very much play. There were live bands playing the entire night and plenty of cheap booze to go around so I did have peppy, drunken potential customers feeling up the knit/crochet goods but didn’t actually get anything. Maybe I shoul’dve been offering free alcohol with purchase.. haha..

Welp, that is all. Hopefully Jessica and I will be doing Artists & Fleas in Williamsburg within a month or so.. the weather is getting more and more beautiful.. the creative juices are flowing.. and things are looking up.