In a word, phew. It was a busy week, and quite enjoyable actually, even if I was working rather than attending, but I must say being able to sleep again is hugely appreciated. I slept for 11 hours this morning. :D
Alas I can’t really say much about it, NDAs and all that jazz. The session I co-presented went quite well, I think – nothing more than a few misspeaks and whatnot on my part, which is hardly atypical. No, it went well. And now I will never have to repeat it or rehearse it ever again, which is also fantastic. :D
So, the bits I can detail… Monday night I met up with F1/Ross/Tom at the the Minna Gallery, which is actually a bar that happens to have some artwork around the place. Nice, but the official designation of ‘gallery’ seems overtly pretentious. Which kinda suited the event, I guess – there was some tech meat-market party going on there. It was really terrible, actually – lots of dudes standing around just trying to run into the wannabe-celebrities of valley tech. The shindig was hosted by Buzz someone, who is apparently… someone. Meh. Wil Shipley was there, as was Kevin Rose. He was notable only for the fact that he was perpetually surrounded by girls that could be at best described charitably as having low standards and realistically described as gold diggers.
Well, it wasn’t that bad, really – good to see F1/Ross/Tom again, and better than just heading straight off home, as I did subsequent nights because I had to rehearse. A little loud, though, for general conversation. There was also a funny moment at some point where I ran into a girl and we both straight away had the “wait, I know you” look, though we spoke only briefly and never figured out what the connection was. My leading hypothesis currently is that she was an intern last summer, but I’m far from certain. It was mainly just funny ’cause it was the whole “two strangers’ eyes meet across a crowded room” kind of thing. Admittedly, I was standing out more than usual since I still had my pastel blue Apple Engineer conference shirt.
The other event I attended was of course the beer bash (I skipped Stump the Experts, alas :( ). It was of course the biggest to date, and was really really packed – probably around ~10k people in Buena Vista gardens. The band this year was the Barenaked Ladies, which was somewhat surprising – I expected some random band I’d never heard of, like last year’s Ozamotley or whatever the heck their name is – so it was a pleasant surprise. And, they actually played really well, albeit not for that long – the beer bash is waaaaay too short now that it’s up in the city. :(
They did make one particularly funny joke that pretty much got everyone laughing out loud – during or after or whatever singing “If I Had a Million Dollars” they were talking about the Kraft Dinners line, and they said something along the lines of:
A: “Oh yeah, we actually did live on those Kraft dinners for a while…”
B: “Right, with the ends of little sausages in them. Yeah, it was a real sausagefest, like this.”
laughter
A: “How does it feel being the girl here?”
hilarity ensues
It probably doesn’t come off nearly as good in writing, but it was great. :)
The very first beer bash, three years ago, that I went to; I was immediately struck by the fact there were girls there. Not attendees, of course, but girlfriends and wives of the engineers. At the time I figured this was the big occasion where everyone brought out their trophy wives for show. I was a little more cynical and naive about the valley back then. :)
I caught up with a few people at the bash – including James (of Loopt), whom had been running the demo phone during the Keynote. He was pretty stoked about John Gruber’s comments about their demo, it was pretty funny. :)
But, yeah, that’s about it. Good, busy week, but it’ll be nice to go back to some more regular hours and to get back to work work.
As an addendum, last night I also caught up with F1/Ross/Tom for bowling & TGI entrees, as is their habit – they indirectly conceded that the only reason they really wanted to go there was because of some waitress they collectively seem to have a crush on. :P Bowling was good – I actually got over 125 in the second game, which is pretty unusual these days, so I was happy. The problem, alas, with mixing a bar with a bowling alley, one that serves substantial food of typical greasy American style, is that all the bowling balls are nicely greased up and very difficult to actually bowl properly. It’d be somewhat amusing if I wasn’t nearly convinced I could end up throwing the ball into another lane if I’m not careful.
