I'm at the Google Party,

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I'm at the Google Party, wrapping up Gnomedex. A band called Soul Mind is playing, Google is providing good food, beer, and free hats! I grabbed an extra one for my dad, he likes hats. Just because you're among fellow geeks doesn't mean you should let your hair down TOO far, earlier I saw an older geek in the 45-55 age range looking at porn on his laptop, and while he was nearly in the corner table, it was pretty obvious to anyone within 35 feet what he was looking at. Ick.

I had a good conversation out in the hallway with Rob Malda of Slashdot earlier, I mentioned the RSS block to him, and he said they'd already caught it and added the IP to their list of firewalls, so that the RSS ban wouldn't kick in again. I also talked to him about the time he Slashdotted one of our servers at work. I didn't hold a grudge. :)

We talked for probably 10 minutes or so, he's a smart guy, but talks at an almost manic pace that's even hard for me to keep up with. We talked a bit about weblog software, and other things which I won't mention here. Someone said on their blog that Rob has no filter between his brain and his mouth, talking with him is total stream-of-consciousness, which is fun.

I'm well rested, and ready

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I'm well rested, and ready for another day at Gnomedex. I'd blog more, if the wi-fi would cooperate, it's still flaky. Yesterday, Howard Butler spotted me wandering around looking for a place to eat lunch, so I wound up sitting with him, and some geeks from Minnesota. We swapped information about the various campus environments we work in, while eating tasty cake. After lunch, Rob Malda from Slashdot gave an interesting, if somewhat rambling, talk. I asked him who he saw as Slashdot's biggest competitor. He said he didn't think they had any competitors. I couldn't think of one either, which is why I asked the question. :)

Malda also said, when asked about Linux on the desktop, that he's doesn't think it's going to materialize anytime soon, and that Apple beat Linux to it with Mac OS X.

Kevin Ugangst from Microsoft's Media division gave an interesting speech, and showed off Halo, which is coming out soon for the PC and Macintosh. I already have Halo for my Xbox, but damn it looks great on the PC, with more weapons, vehicles, etc. thrown in. I hope it doesn't come out for a while though, as I have plenty of games to play right now.

I skipped out on the movie night to go eat at Spaghettiworks (thanks to alert reader Emily McMahon) with my wife, then we drove over to Clive to visit with some friends and see their new baby. According to Mike, I missed out on free beer, but I can handle that, as long as they didn't call my name for any prizes that I wasn't there to win, such as the Windows Media PC. I'll freely admit now that I'm picky about these sorts of things, but I really didn't want to watch movies projected onto a screen with a projector that wasn't quite bright enough, with mono sound. No thanks, I've got a 53" widescreen HDTV at home with 5.1 surround sound, and my living room isn't filled with fellow geeks tapping away at their keyboards. :)