Packing up right now and heading to New Orleans, Louisiana for some New Year’s celebrating. It was a great year and looking forward to an even better one…..

90% of Denver just now found out they have a Major League Baseball team.

Refresh was good the other night but Thea wasn’t available to speak. I look forward to that the next time. I had a real solid conversation with Matthew Alberty about the Houston area job market. We did find out however that OpenCoffee Club will be happening in Houston next Friday. I am even going to drag Rodrigo Jimenez of Whiteboardlabs to that.

I had previously written a post about OpenCoffee Club that you can read about here. My next post is going to be about the big air I am getting this evening on the river. You know you better come back to see the pics of that.

Tonite I will be attending Refresh Houston. The subject is very relevant to me because it will be about Flash Accessibility and Standards. It is surely going to make some of the regulars a little uneasy because of their contempt for Flash

I will post tomorrow about the folks I see and meet up there. Looking forward to hearing Thea Eaton of Snert Studios speak.

I went to the informal Houston Refresh last night where our hometown star - Matt Mullenweg was hanging out. That guy is the founder of Wordpress and was recently voted one of the Top 50 Most Influential People on the Internet. Not bad for a young blood (I watched Dog the Bounty Hunter last night and I have been needing to use the term “Young Blood”).

The real story about last night is the amount of Houstonians who were there that are working on some cool apps and projects. Who needs the Bay Area?

I had a real good time at SXSW. It was finally a chance to meet some people that I had never met in person but had interacted with online. I kicked off the first day with an early panel and ran into my friend Blake Killian of Voodoo Ventures. We game planned a bit during the panel and decided on what we were going to hit that day. After the panel, we went and talked to Ryan Carson of Carsonified for a minute and then headed off for lunch. After lunch I ran into Chris Schultz of Voodoo Ventures and we found Blake again and headed over to Austin Barcamp.

At Barcamp, I met Blake Burris of Corazon Labs and he has an app up his sleeve. I don’t want to say too much about it right now because he is still working on some details but it is going to be pretty slick and useful. That’s kind of hard to say both of those adjectives about most web 2.0 wannabes. I also ran into Jeff Corkran of InnerEcho and it looks like we need to do some work together. I have a few ideas and Jeff’s company may be able to help me execute.

I also met Brian Oberkirch of BrianOberkirch.com and he always has solid information. His panel was cool because it was relevant. It was about running an internet company outside of the valley. Told you it was relevant…..

The first panel I made it to this morning was about turning your projects into revenue generating businesses. This hasn’t really been a problem I have faced because my businesses weren’t hobbies. I only started my companies to spend a $1 and make $2. The panel was great and the information was inspiring.

We had Ted Rheingold of Dogster/Catster, Tara Hunt of CitizenAgency, Gabe Rivera of Techmeme, the PixelGirl, and Ryan Carson of Carson Systems. These panelist definitely brought a crowd and handled the discussion flow pretty good. I want to get the podcast to go over it all again.

I was sitting in the back with Blake and there was a group huddled around an electrical outlet as if it was 10 degrees and they were huddled around a fire. One of those guys was Robert Scoble of Scobleizer and another guy I met in the group was Dave Coustan of Earthlink.