After the luckiest false fire alarm of my life I was headed to my dream conference today – The Art of Marketing. I had been bugging the guys at the office about this one for months, trying to find a way to justify the $400 cost, but I couldn’t make it make sense.

The night before a big presentation, the fire alarm in my building went off at 11pm, meaning that I had to walk down a seemingly endless set of stairs, out into the cold while the fire department confirmed that some jackass had thought that it would be funny to ruin an entire apartment building’s night.

While outside, I ran into my two favorite neighbors, Chris Bradford of The New Gentleman’s Club and his fantastic wife, my hairdresser, Katie Rose of @HairByKatieRose. We talked for a while about feeding ponies and catching up when Chris happened to mention “some conference tomorrow” that he wouldn’t be able to attend. I was all over that and due to Chris’ incredible generosity I was all of a sudden headed to see some of my favorite speakers in the world the next day.

I had to miss the morning sessions, but the speakers were reportedly very informative. My first session was one of the world’s foremost website analysts, Avinash Kaushik. Going in, I had told people that I thought the guy was a bit arrogant and may have even called him a dick because of an experience that I had on the comments section of his blog Occam’s Razor. I was almost instantly converted. Avinash’s talk was insanely informative and reaffirming, including tips like: