I’d like to thank everyone who voted for me to perform at Happy Cog’aoke 2 this year. I came in 5th place in the voting. This meant I was the 5th last performance of the evening, which tends to give performers a little bit of an upperhand since the audience has had more time to enjoy the open bar & the judges have gotten comfortable in their scoring methods for contestants. It is much easier to blow the judges away when they’ve already seen the majority of the performances, in my opinion.

Unfortunately the morning of Happy Cog’aoke 2, I had an unfortunate mishap resulting in a broken collarbone. I was (ironically?) heading to the Convention Center to start my day off attending a panel on failure hosted by Happy Cog & friends. I was borrowing a friend’s Gary Fisher 3 speed cruiser while I was in town instead of shipping my own bike to Austin like I did the previous year. As I was embarking on a slight uphill, I attempted to build some momentum and stood up to pedal a little bit. I was already riding at a decent speed so when the gears in the internal hub skipped, I lost control and wiped out pretty hard on the pavement. I jumped up to avoid any oncoming traffic (thankfully there wasn’t any), took off my backpack, and moved the bike and my things to the sidewalk. After shaking it off and catching my breath I quickly realized that I couldn’t lift my arm. Putting my backpack back on wasn’t going to happen. It was then I realized that I had broken my collarbone. It was very tender and was crunching upon the slightest movements. I knew at that point my adventures in Austin were going to be drastically different than I had planned.

I was approximately 4 blocks from a hospital so I gathered my things as best I could and walked from the scene of the accident the ER. This was no easy task. After spending the better part of the afternoon in the Brackenridge Emergency Room, I rested up since nothing was going to stop me from performing for a second year in a row at Cog’aoke. Not even a freshly broken clavicle was going to keep me from the stage. I had to scrap a few gimmicks I was going to incorporate into my set since I was now performing with only 1 hand. I had to ask The Keyboard Man to assist me in tossing out my swag (haveboard.com stickers and an assortment of beads) at the beginning of my set. I had to come with a straight up energetic performance and rock the mic (and sling) with confidence and pride.

I recruited to Alex Hillman to record my performance with my Flip Mino HD. Due to technical difficulties with the camera, Alex did what any resourceful nerd (I think he prefers ‘geek‘) would do in a time of technical crisis and whipped out his iPhone to record as much as he could of my time on stage. Below is the footage he was able to get on his iPhone. It wasn’t the whole performance but it will have to do for those of you that couldn’t make it.

That performance earned me 3rd place in this year’s competition! I had such a great time regardless of my injury. I won a Limited Edition Gowalla iPod Nano as well as a copy of Rock Band 2 (which I still need to pick up from the folks at Happy Cog).

I would like to thank Alex Harris of AlexDesign.com for the photo’s used in this post. He was right up front and took amazing photos of all the performers and had them posted the very next day.

Thanks again for all your votes, cheers, and support as well as everyone at Happy Cog and all the Cog’aoke Sponsors for helping throw another great SXSWi Party! I’m already looking forward to next year.