Finding the outer geek
Published by on December 11th, 2005
Last night jEN and I attended the Robert Scoble Geek Dinner - a gathering of blogging geeks in London for chats, networking and great Mexican food.
Having never attended such an event or paid a great deal of attention to one in the past, I was a little apprehensive about what this evening might be like. Was it going to be an interesting gathering of similarly-minded people, or a tedious conglomeration of obsessive, socially inept loners? Gratefully it was an evening of the former.
It was an enjoyable informal gathering of bloggers, some of whom had travelled quite some distance to be there. Now I am no great networker and find social situations hard work - yes, I can get up in front of a crowd and deliver standup gags to total silence and not be phased to even the minutest degree, but social stuff is not all that comfortable. Thankfully the evening wasn’t spent hanging around in the corner somewhere as we did manage to meet and chat to some interesting personalities.
Ewan Spence of the TPN Rock Show (amongst other projects) had some very interesting and practical thoughts concerning a potential new podcast show I have been considering. That man is a veritable tsunami of ideas! More info on the new show once things move from ideas to implementation early next year. Good chats with Hugh Fraser of the Storynory podcast, Andrew Denny and his passion for UK waterways, Dave Oliver (who was celebrating his birthday last night with a cake and a gift of Mrs. Spence’s chocolate nipples) and I was very interested to meet and learn about the success of Sven Latham’s Blogwise blog directory. Plus some others I’ll apologies for not remembering the names of - at least I’ll know some faces next time!
The highlight of the evening had to be the surprise that MSN decided to pay for half the bill, meaning the expected £20 per head became a mere tenner. Nice one MSN, though I do feel a little dirty eating on Microsoft’s pocket, it did ease the wallet-sucking pain of Margaritas.
Pop over to regularjen for pics and her view on the evening. Obligatory, traffic-generating technorati tags follow:
Technorati Tags: scoble geek dinner
2 Responses to “Finding the outer geek”
The secret, of course, is to take the tsunami of ideas and filter them very carefully to get the “fried gold!”
[...] howing me the green stud on her tongue. It was great fun talking to Jen and her husband, Neil Dixon, about how they met each other via their blogs. The audio is 7 minut [...]
Neil,
Exactly the same thing happened to me earlier this year. The drive started misbehaving so I took the plunge and upgraded myself to a Maxto 160Gb drive. I was surprised at how simple it was - even for a non-techy like me. It took only a few minutes and has workes perfectly ever since. There IS a noticeable hum from the drive now though - but that me be because I was too scared to run the ‘quiet’ utility, for which you have to plug the drive in to a PC first. But you don’t hear it when the TV is on and it isn’t that noticeable.
In case you haven’t seen it the upgrade instructions are here and my jubilant post-upgrade post is here.
Good luck - it is not something you will regret, that’s for sure.
Mmmm, was pondering a Sky+, but the prospect of the hard drive packing up after a couple of years doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence…
Despite the disk (imminently) dying in just under 2 years, I’d still have one. We watch little TV so a device that enables us to catch what we want and watch it when we want it is worth every penny - and more. Wouldn’t be without it!