I'm not going to go out on a limb and say that SXSW was the main reason I dug my roots out of Kansas City and planted myself in Austin, but it did help a little.  Well, okay, I interviewed in person while I was on vacation during SXSW.  I somehow managed to wedge it in between the Interactive portion and the Music portion.  The rest of the story happened ultra fast.  It went from feeling like I bombed the interview to accepting an offer in about 2 weeks.  My start date was a month after and I had to scramble to plan something I've never done: relocation.

I did my research and picked up a couple of handy tools along the way.  The whole trip went mostly perfect and I stayed well within a meager budget.  SXSW season just kicked off and I figured, what better way to enjoy another go at it than by sharing my experiences.  So I signed up for the SXSW Panel Picker and created an entry, "The Magic Carpet Ride: Relocation Made Easy."  Voting began today and I'm asking everyone out there to register and vote for my panel.  There's a ton of information to share for people who are thinking about relocating or booking their ticket tomorrow. Vote for it at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/12321

Here's the Description and Questions Answered:

After toiling long and hard to get your dream job, you finally landed it. The only problem is that it's in another part of the world! Fortunately, there are tools both online and in the mobile world that can help. Mike Hochanadel will discuss the tools used for his relocation experience and share tips to help the tech centric crowd in their own magic carpet ride.

1. What can my future employer do to help relocate?
2. What is the most cost effective way to relocate?
3. What are the stages of relocation?
4. How I can seamlessly surf between the stages of relocation?
5. What loose ends are tied up at the end of relocation?

No, not those kind of cans, but the kind you can wrap around your head.  Okay still, I'm talking about headphones.  Since starting at my awesome new job, there have been some freedoms that I have been accustomed to that are no longer there.  One of them has been the ability to stream audio.  That's all fine and dandy as I have an iPod Touch that I bought because I had to give up my iPhone from the old job.  So, what's a somewhat young and enterprising programmer supposed to do?  Upgrade the ear buds to a portable audiophile rig.  Here's what I did.

Alright so I figured that if I was going to be locked into rocking my headphone, then it would be a great opportunity to upgrade my ears.  Way back in the day I bought me a pair of Stanton Dj Pro 2000s and it served its purpose for such a long time.  The problem was that the band that held the earphones together cracked and today I have a glued up version of the awesome headphones of yesterday.  Even better still I originally bought it at about 20 bucks off because the store I got it at didn't have the ones I wanted in stock and gave me this upgrade at the price of mis-stocked headphones.  I needed to get the same kind of great deal.

Fast forward to a month ago.  I was awashed in my newfound job and realized it was time to upgrade.  When I got home, I researched the blazes out of entry level audiophile headphones.  I didn't want to go full out and drop over 4 figures on a pair of headphones.  All I needed was something better and richer than the ear buds I was rotating through like disposable contact lenses.  The great people at HeadRoom Audio built a list of the top 10 headphones of this year and it boiled down to two headphones.  First the Sennheiser HD 518 and some Audio Technica headphones.  My lovely girlfriend notched a wireless set of cans for me from Sennheiser for Xmas a year or two ago so that was the deciding factor.

The Sennheiser HD 518 touts being the audiophile's entry level dream.  That's exactly what I wanted.  I've been bouncing off of ear buds for a couple of years now.  First because the Stantons were too much to handle and secondly because having some circumaural cans on at the gym stands out to the point of awkwardness.  I slapped these guys on and tranced out the Daft Punk Tron: Legacy soundtrack.  Instantly I found what I was missing with second hand and first hand Apple ear buds.  I got the feeling that the mids, lows, and highs washed out better and were richer than any ear bud could come close to comparing.  That's expected though, they are higher quality.

I was told that there is a burn in period of about 100 hours for the headphones until it fully realizes its soundtential.  Even with that knowledge it was not enough for me.  The problem I had, and admittedly HeadRoom Audio pointed out, was that for portable audio, the headphones were just not enough.  I had an awesome pair of headphones that could handle way more than the power the iPod Touch was pouring out.  That's a major problem.  I mean, if I jacked in directly to the computer with my amazingly awesome long cord, then I could have the power to provide the headphones with a range to deliver quality sounds to my ears.  I need the same kind of power but in a portable format.

Enter the Fiio E11.  Head-fi.org, as well as other websites, pointed out that headphone amplifiers can be that bridge between lame sound and great sound for the swanky headphones purchased.  I was hesitant at first because most amplifiers were bulky, expensive, and too much for what I needed.  That was until I found out that Fiio was putting out an amplifier that is portable and powerful.  The E11 runs off a USB chargeable Li-On battery and drives a louder sound with adjustable EQ and Gain settings.  Long story short, the E11 was the perfect complement to my Sennheiser HD 518, after getting the cheapo Fiio iOs to audio port bridge connector.

So that's my rig.  I have the bridge connector outputting my music and podcasts to the E11 and then the sound rolls on through to my 518s.  The sound is at least 10 times better than what I had before with ear buds.  There are a couple of problems, though.  First off, I dumbed off and did not find out tha the 518s are not isolated to outside sound.  What I mean to say is that if I pump it real loud, everyone in the office will hear it.  That wasn't exactly what I was going for.  That said, the sound is richer no matter the volume so overall it is a better experience.  The only other problem is the setup and teardown time it takes to slap that stuff to my iPod Touch.  It's a first world problem so it's no big deal at all.

I encourage everyone out there to upgrade their listening experience. When researching this topic, I came across many options that increasingly wanted to take more out of my pocket.  At the end of the day, you just need to spring a little bit more on a pair of headphones.  In my case, I needed an amplifier that was portable and could pump enough juice to make the headphones worthwhile.  Just like I did, you too can get a rig that upgrades your experience  without having to drop over $200.  Seriously, Beats By Dre and the like use name recognition for price than anything else.

Sometimes opportunity comes and sometimes it is so great that it inspires you to reach past your fears and take a great risk.  That kind of risk manifested itself in front of me a little over a month ago.  I found a job in Austin, Texas and moved from my home in the Kansas City metro area.  It was scary at first, but ever since I started working on moving down here it's been real smooth.  I'm amazed at how everything has turned out.

Opportunity means different things for different folks.  For me, it's being able to learn while doing my part contributing to the group.  After three days, I've found that and then some.  Compared to my whole, and I mean my whole, career  I feel like my expectation of work and knowledge meets a real world environment.  I couldn't feel more comfortable.  And happy.

During my farewell tour, everyone told me that Austin was a cool town.  I understand that it is, but if I came down here just for the scene and not for the job, then I would still be in Kansas City.  Austin's live music, technology hub, and mash of culture is only the icing on the cake of my life choice.  The more people tell me that this town is a cool place, the more it bothers me.  I always thought that for something to be cool, you don't actually call it cool.

The hardest part of the farewell tour was saying goodbye, not the massive amount of BBQ.  This is first time I truly relocated and it got to be pretty tough toward the end.  It's not as hard as I thought it would be, but that can only be because of how great it's going down here.  Still, I will miss my friends and the wonderful relationships I've built with them in last 1o years or more.  Hey, they have a place to crash in Austin now.

It's taken me a long time to reach this point.  I used to be so scared of big changes, or at least having the will to make big changes.  Maybe that's why I was ginormous for most of my life and mostly single.  Once I got passed that and nurtured my will, the fear turned into calculated risks.  Moving to Austin and taking the great new job only builds upon that.  I feel like I'm playing with house money now.  I'm not afraid to fail.

So here I sit in my own office in my three bedroom apartment, riding a high of a successful move.  Will it be a successful life change?  I'm not sure, but I know at the end of the day, it will be a great adventure.  Everybody's got their adventure and everybody needs to overcome their fears and actually embark on their adventure.  I'm doing it and I hope you have or will soon.

I'm a week removed from SXSW and I finally recovered.  The sickness stayed over in my body for the end of my music portion of the trip.  To learn more about that, head over to my music site, http://h0key.net.  I've had plenty of time to reflect on my interactive experience and would like to sum up the conference and what I took away from it.  For all of the stimulating action that took place in,out, and around the conference the message for me was:  Start cultivating the white noise.

Last year was my first year for SXSW.  The starry eyes was somewhat blinded and numbed to all of the commotion going on around them.  I went on my own volition and had no other sponsorship but myself.  It was clear that I was a rookie at it all and I ended up missing items I really wanted to see.  Hey, it just kept moving so I told myself that it's all good and go on to the next thing.  This year was a little different.

I knew how to plan better for SXSW. Sure the conference is still a bursting damn of activity, but I had a paddle this time.  The newness washed away to wonder as I noticed just how much bigger the conference got in one year.  Last year I pretty much stayed in the Austin Convention Center.  This year I was running at most 10 blocks to go from one hotel to the next and back to the convention center.  The Screenburn Arcade blew up.  There's now a fashion portion of the conference.  Even the exclusive startup launches were growing.

Last year it was a race between Foursquare and Gowalla for location supremecy.  This year's theme was group texting messaging.  I lost count on the number of startups all vying for the same mantle and I'm still confused as to who won.  Of course, there were other startups but it looked like just about everyone who wanted to launch pegged down SXSW as the place to do it.  That ended up just upping the bar for white noise at the conference.

Which alot of the naysayers were pointing too as a reason why the conference was weak this year.  Some people were saying that the conference is getting too big for anyone to make a big splash.  Apparently the locals have been saying that each aspect of SXSW is pulling its own little Burning Rome scenario.  Even for some, the exclusivity that was present in the conference's early years is gone and they detest the quasi-exclusive nature of the conference today.  That is their reaction to more and more noise being created at SXSW.

That's what I see this year.  The hype two years ago of Twitter that convinced me to go and the location battle of Gowalla and Foursquare of last year now leads to an enormous amount of new data and noise generation.  Of course, the noise brings many, so I was much more successful networking wise.  I skipped the film portion altogether due to the size of the lines and instead went to more parties, which grew in numbers as well.  Of all of the apps I downloaded this year I'll more than likely use only one or two.

What does all of this noise mean?  We're getting ready to make some sense of new types of information, either in viewing or understanding.  When I look back to the track I took for interactive talks, I can see that point overlap over most of the sessions.  Whether its using government data or music metadata, people are finding news ways to see how data is represented.  Mobile applications up front must be simple to see and use, all the while the data they generate is complex and ample.  Reid Hoffman's Web 3.0 presentation hit the nail on the head.  The a calm before the storm is the push to understand and make sense of this new social, mobile, and freshly revealed data.

So the next step for me is to roll up the sleeves and get to work.  With new data, there's new opportunity.  The most exciting takeaway from SXSW 2011 is that there's alot of new information out there and I have a chance to make a difference by making something special from it.  There's no longer a sense that I have to be the next Twitter or the next Foursquare.  There's a new revision of technology right around the corner and I'm getting ready to be apart of it instead of a bystander.

Alrighty, I'm finally back home and recovering after a marathon of tech and music that was SXSW. I'm sitting down sipping some hot tea and getting ready for a night time cold and flu Alka Seltzer bath. That's right, I brought home lots of tech info and a cold from beautiful Austin, Texas. Hey, if you are gonna do it, you gotta go hard or not at all. At any rate I have one more day of summaries to dispatch before I start something new this year. I will go over each talk I went to into a little more depth, more for the benefit of myself more than anything else, as well as give proper respect to the .

The final day saw me head to Ballroom C in the Austin Convention Center for Hacking RSS: Filtering & Processing Obscene Amounts of Information. This was more of a personal joy than most anything else. I use Google Reader on a daily basis and run through an insane amount of information. Any kind of help is much appreciated. I got here when the lady discussed using Yahoo! Pipes, BackType, and Twitter to jumble around real-time information and tune it to your personal preferences. This is gonna be a fun one to go back over and implement.

I do some side work here and there (http://hoketronics.com), and because of this I decided that I owed that side a bit of love by going to Freelancers: You're Five Products Away From Freedom. The guy who gave the talk is one of the Five Tech Guys in Kilts and also wrote a CodeIgniter book. While geared toward freelancers, I see benefit across the board from this talk. His main idea was that there are tools that cut across so quick to publish and take payments for any type of product, that any idea of fix someone comes up with can be monetized almost instantly. Great stuff there.

My day job does work geared more toward the government side of things. With How Governments are Changing Where Big Ideas Happen, I got a small taste of how governments lure tech companies. Representatives from Louisiana, Europe, Shanghai, and even Austin talked about methods their local governments use to lure talent to their area. It was a refreshing view to see that the public sector is starting to catch up and compete with the private sector in these areas. One thing I didn't know, Facebook opened up their first office outside of California in Austin, Texas.

After snacking some lunch and raking in the schwag from trade show floor, I dipped into the Reid Hoffman Presentation titled, "Data as Web 3.0." Reid was the driving force behind LinkedIn and his discussion revolved around the next iteration of the Internet. With describing Web 1.0 as searching data and retrieving it as well as Web 2.0 as introducing social aspects of relations, Reid presented his thoughts on Web 3.0. He claims that the next step is the processing and making sense out of the huge amounts of data spewed out from the marriage of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. He then ran down his top 10 list for entrepreneurs. Again, all great stuff.

Finally, since I missed all of the keynotes this year, I decided to attend the closing speech by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling. Bruce was the man behind the cyberpunk culture and he gave a great punkish talk to close out the Interactive portion of the conference. Between his musings, ramblings, and one liners, Bruce laid out his biggest problem today. Progress is moving fast and it's up to the youth and it's ability with tech to start taking the lead. I'll never forget him telling the Baby Boomers to stop trying to hold on and get out of the way.

All and all day 5 filled the few gaps left in my puzzle board of needs for SXSW Interactive. I filled it plenty with some hardcore code and design sessions earlier. Now I had some business and a little more government items to pluck right in. Finally, Bruce Sterling was the last inspirational piece to make my puzzle complete. With almost a week out of SXSWi 2011, I'm still feeling complete and basking in the glow.

I'm still catching up but now that I've hit the stride for the music portion (see http://h0key.net), I can catch up a bit in the morning. Day 4 for the Interactive portion of the conference saw myself hit up a PHP themed workshop, a couple of mobile web talks, and some interesting thoughts on authentication and privacy on the web. All in all it was fairly fun, even so some the of night time stuff was a little light.

First up I hit up a workshop about BigData and PHP. Some of the luminaries of the talk included the Mozilla lady that wrote the PHP and MySQL Web Development book I own. The focus for the talk regarded strategies to employ when dealing with BigData. BigData are either large chunks of data, large amount of miniscule data, or tons of processing for data in a short amount of time. The CAP theory made its presence known as well.

The next couple of talks I'll group together. In Mobile Opportunites for the Entrepeneurs in 2011 talked about how developers can build more useful tools for mobile technology. The Future of Mobile Gaming/Entertainment had the Angry Birds guy there talking about how awesome the game was and how it was a crap shoot to begin with. He also stated that mobile gaming needed to be taken seriously, with his game getting almost 2% of the total yearly US viewing average compared to television. Lastly, it was Designing for Mobile Web and it had another Sencha Touch representative there. I'm going to use Sencha Touch with PhoneGap real, real soon.

The last talk of the day was fantastic. OAuth, OpenID, Facebook Connect: Authentication Design Best Practices was more than what I expected. The speaker went though the session pointing out some historical and current issues with authentication and privacy surrounding it. The gist of the talk was, you need to be conservative with the data that you collect so you don't make it feel creepy. Also, please make the login process as simple as possible.

The night time was alright. My girlfriend and I hit up the Wired Happy Hour, which I won a lot of schwag at last year. Unfortunately I didn't win anything this time but I did enjoy Texas' own Lone Star beer. After that, it was time to go the GDGT party and I have to say it kind of stunk. The schwag was drool-worthy and I did get a chance to play with the Motorola Zoom, the line was terrible and inside was too packed for music. So after that, we just hot-footed it to Zen Steakhouse for some tasty Japanese fair.

So that's the quick run down for day 4. I purposefully did not go into detail because I will be talking about each topic on its own after I recover. In the meantime, I've got one more Interactive day to gush about. Look for that tomorrow. Now on to some Irish craziness!

It's getting a little bit easier to recount just what exactly happened on this tech-infused first half of SXSW 2011 in Austin, Texas. I'm beginning to feel more caught up and am ready to share the joy and wonder that is collaborating with tech and creatives. Sunday saw no rest for me as I hit up the more tech friendly type talks and avoided the gloss that was overreaching trend-philosophy. It was the calm before the storm that was Monday. I'm glad I survived it well.

First up was my contender for best panel of SXSW 2011. In 'One Codebase, Endless Possibilities, Real HTML5 Hacking,' I got a taste of some real world usage of rolling out the same code for tons of different platforms. Of course it was HTML 5 based, but what was presented to me was a strategy that made switching between platforms super simple. I believe the only hard part was sym-linking items to the same codebase. Backend wizardry aside, the use of PhoneGap and it's beta online builder turned me on enough to sign up and give it a whirl. I don't own a Mac so this will give me a path to build for iOS I previously didn't have.

Next up again is a front runner for panel of the year. I saw Paul Lemere's panel last year and it totally blew me away. The Echo Nest's veteran platform guy was back this year but his path led him down the fun road that is visualizing music data. I didn't know that others tried to map music taste on paper before the advent of computers. Paul took us from that beginning to his demo of what a music visualization application can do today. I taped this on my Kodak PlaySport and will post it up there when it's done. It's so awesome.

Next up was a couple of Microsoft guys talking about the 'Future of Touch User Interface Design.' This was another great panel. It gave me the time to actually think about how a person interacts with a computer. Their big beef was that most touch development tends to lean on what we've used in the past for computer interaction. They want to make computers talk our language instead of training us to speak computer language. Lot's of cool videos and ideas were presented and it will definitely help me think more deeply about interface when design my next mobile application.

Finally, for the talks, I punished myself even further with 'Embracing NoSQL - Your First Cassandra Project'. It was a 2 hour workshop but I only stayed as long to get an idea of Cassandra, since their setup required us to use Macs with Ruby on Rails installed. The talk was informative and it gave me a sense of how columns and keyspaces are used within Cassandra. I've yet to find a reason to use this technology but now I know when and how to use it.

That was it for the day talks, the night life lived up to its expectation as well. Fist up was the Buzz Out Loud party at the Cedar Street Courtyard. I subscribed to the podcast since I got my Palm Pre and was happy to see the guys kick it live. After walking away with some schwag and an upclose look at Felicia Day, my lovely girlfriend and I hit up the Computer Blip Blop Bullshit Party II hosted by the Found Footage Festival. It was 10 times better than last year and we're excited to check out those guys in Kansas City at the Record Bar in April. Also, check out The Black and White Years, they will blow your heads off.

Hey! You may be wondering, "Did SXSW swallow Mike whole?" I'm back today to say no way. The last two days have been a blur of tech, meetups, and parties. I am utilizing my time way more than last year and because of that I haven't had the to report all of the action. So, bear with me as I try to run down what's happened. Let's start with Saturday all quick fire style:

The first panel talked about 'Tools and Processes for ADD Project Managers/Entrepreneurs.' Essentially what this panel talked about was methods that one can use to help fight any external or internal items. There ended up being two people, one a marketer tech type and another, who was a therapist. Their whole gist was that we need to have hto counteract the different types of issues facing ADD type people. It wasn't anything I was not used to. Some of the methods included using lists and to do lists, which I do already with the GTD methodology. That said, it was a nice refresher that pointed me to other methods to fight distractibility beast.

Next up was a whole set of Future 15 talks revolving around the government. My day job includes work in the government contract industry so these sets of talks helped me out to determine what more I can do as well as what ways my company to become thought leaders in. The gist of all of the talks revolved around 3 items:

• Open data from the government is ripe for the picking
• There's still a need to make things super simple for all citizens
• The government retires more than half of their workforce and it's time for young tech-type people to take their place

I have to say, no matter my or your political preference that there is ripe opportunity to take advantage of what everyone is saying is a slow, hulking beast. That's right, the government. Not only will there be funding available, but there's also innovation for taking some draconian methods and turning it into something more 21st Century.

The final talk was a workshop for yours truly. The workshop titled 'Building Native Apps Across Platforms' dealt with the delimma of supporting one application across many mobile devices. I saw Jonathan Stark's talk last year and was happy to see him again with the guy from Sencha Touch and Appcelerator Titanium. What I got from this talk was a couple of cool CSS3 type methods and a great run-down of Sencha Touch. I didn't know that you could do more than just include a library of mobile friendly frameworks. You can do MVC as well as more proprietary framework items. It's a good thing it's a free license.

Once again, I took to the night in all of its glory. Saturday night saw me and my lady head to the Frog Design Interactive Opening party. Just like last year they had some cool human interactive toys to play with. The favorite for me was the Angry Birds rip off called "Hungry Birds." You had to jump a certain way on the stage to have your bird chomp. The other thing that was pretty cool was the Ableton Live like controller for humans that involved people actually standing on squares to activate signals to the layer. All in all it was pretty cool. I think we went to other parties but that's all I remember now. I'm sure pics and recounts will follow soon.

I'm not really reporting, but I'm actually blogging.  Fortunately for me, the line between reporting and blogging is seriously blurred, all in the sacrifice of journalism.  But back to my point.  I'm here in the glorious Austin Motel, gently tapping away and reflecting on a big blur day of travelling.  From some morning claws to feeling Mediterranean, it was both fast and eventful.

In case you were wondering, I won last night at Settlers of Catan.  I also lost after that.  Catan is too much fun.  The game combines the best parts of Monopoly, Jenga, and I think I tasted egg and cinnamon.  If you have 3-4 people and about an hour to kill, take the time to play this ditty because it is totally worth it.

After some tasty local donutry, my beautiful girlfriend and I hit the road to Austin.  This year was a little different as we took  3 hours yesterday to make today much easier.  And much easier it was.  We blew through Oklahoma in the morning and then enjoyed some tasty fare in Texas before hitting Austin.  Miguelito's has the tastiest Mexican beef stew that I've ever had.  Make a point to drop by there if you are around the area.

Compared to last year, our drive was much easier.  It paid off in dividends as we now have some time to take for tomorrow's SXSW kick off.  Today we picked up our badges and suspiciously light schwag bags.  We lapped the convention center and pinpointed our favorite places before returning back to our hotel.  And what a great hotel it is.

Last year, we stopped by Joe's Hot Coffee everyday and noticed that the Austin Motel was way close and more scenic than the place we stayed at last year.  Fast forward to December last year and about a 100 tries where you have yours truly landing an exclusive spot in the scenic Austin Motel.  We have the Mediterranean room and enjoying every second of it.   Tomorrow has plenty of activity for us and I'm glad our home for the next week and half has a landscape painting of Red Sea on a wall.