I won’t go into too much detail about what happened at Scoble‘s geek dinner the other day, but suffice to say, I was quite overwhelmed by the number of attendees. The entire Chaat Cafe was taken over by a plethora of 40 to 50 geeks. The noise decibel in the room got notably higher as more people arrived. Who knew geeks could be so loud? Jasmeet and I were saying that the restaurant owners must have either really loved us for the turnout, or really hated us for blocking any further clientele.
Shockingly (or perhaps not so shockingly), I managed to get through the entire dinner (plus Matt‘s afterparty) without getting involved in a tech discussion. I mostly listened intently, nodded, laughed, and fiddled around with other people’s gadgets. Not that I didn’t hear a lot of tech geek talk; I just didn’t see the need for my participation. Curse my lack of tech knowledge! Also, I’m not sure if this sort of dinner would be very conducive to new bloggers — seems to be more of a get-together of people who are already in-the-know. Of course, the dinner wasn’t specifically meant for new bloggers, so the idea is probably moot.
As far as my actual participation in conversations, I did talk about other stuff. Like Indian food. And alcoholic beverages. And rainy weather. And San Francisco geography. And Flickr (Okay, ONE tech-related discussion). And other stuff I can’t remember. Scoble had the right idea when he actually walked around and talked to people; then again, he IS the host of the darn thing. Other people mingled too, but all in all, a lot of people just kinda stuck to people they already knew. I’d propose some kind of icebreaker introduction game, but that’d be too radical and horrifying I’m sure.
Most of the actual fun took place at the afterparty at Monsieur Mullenweg‘s place. It was great fun seeing Jonas and Jasmeet trading bartending duties. MJ and I flitted about arranging food on the dinner table, which turned out to be rather pointless since people didn’t eat much anyway (to those who did eat — those brownie squares? I made them. You may compliment me now.) After that, I mostly just lounged about being all lazy. I took some photos, ate, drank, played around with my Powerbook, and gossiped. It was fun. Kudos to Matt for letting us use his apartment as our playpen, so to speak.
More talk of the dinner/afterparty: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Photos of the dinner/afterparty:
Mine: here, and here.
Jasmeet’s: here, and here.
Jason‘s: here.
Jonas‘s: here
PS. One of the more exciting parts of the day for me, was what happened BEFORE the dinner even took place. But I’ve been warned by certain parties that names cannot be used in the re-telling of events. And there’s really no way to tell the story without everyone knowing who I’d be talking about. So it’ll have to remain a mystery… for now.
