This is my day at SXSW for March 13th

Saturday morning I arrived at the conference center early. There were many great looking panels happening.

I attended "We Fucked Up", a panel with folks from Happy Cog on how they recognize, deal with and learn from failure. The panelists had relevant, well dictated examples of things they'd fucked up in the past, and how they dealt with them. This was the only panel I was at where it didn't lose me in details or a lack of conflict. Particularly interesting was their part on "the two types of failure": Unrecoverable and recoverable.

Unrecoverable requires you abandon ship. Recoverable the kind that requires course correction. Both types of failure, according to the panelists, have one thing in common: you need to recognize them and own them.

The panel let out close to lunch, so a few of us went to Franks, a hot dog place near the conference center. To unleash our inner hipsters, we all ordered tall cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Expectedly the food was delicious and the beer was total shit.

Knowing that Ze Frank's talk at 3:30 would be busy, we got to Ballroom D early. We were able to get a seat without much trouble, but by the time the panel was about to begin the place was pretty near full.

Ze was interviewed by Scott Kirsner, and began the talk with a short presentation on some projects he's done recently. The focus of the talk was around living a creative lifestyle. Ze's an amazing speaker, and I imagine it's pretty unnerving to have to interview him.

What I took away from the panel and Q&A was something Ze's show imparted a long time ago – think it, do it.

It was really interesting to get a glimpse into Ze's day-to-day life. And some of what he had to say around making The Show was really fascinating. It sounds like it was as much or more work than you would expect to do a daily video blog with audience participation woven in.

With Ze's talk at an end we went out to have dinner. We went to Chupacabra, lured by their siren patio. The waitress was kind enough to serve us pitchers, even though they weren't really on the menu for that time of day. If you're in Austin and looking for a place to have a drink in the sun, I'd recommend it.

Tim, Brett & Travis had been raving about this pizza truck. So we set our sights on that for food. It didn't set up until 8:00pm, but was worth the wait. Stony's Pizza is fantastic – and it turns out his truck was made in Winnipeg. Although the manufacturer recommended he use frozen pizzas in it. I'm amazed he didn't punch out the salesguy.

After that we spent most of the evening looking for someplace to have a few drinks. The Austin downtown area was closed to vehicles, so walking around was easy.

Having learned my lesson from Thursday night, the mantra of the night was "pace".