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Archive for the 'Blogmunity' Category
A quick overview of what happened last week. I apologise for any details I leave out but a week of really shitty sleep and a very busy week doesn’t help my memory.
Sunday: Flight over on Sunday, Got no sleep while the mulley man who was sitting beside me kept teasing me about it in between naps. However I was unusally alive after the flight which I am still paying for now.
We regrouped at the airport and after figuring out how we’d get there and how to pack suitcases in rented cars we arrived in the Cardinal Hotel (Kudos to Shane for managing to fit myself and Hélène into the back of car). I think we just relaxed for a while and then met up later for pizza and then I’m pretty sure we went out for a few beers. Seeing a good few people get carded was a good laugh. Especially when Damien laughed at someone for being carded and then was carded moments later.
Monday: We did little that morning but scope out places to have a decent breakfast. We met up with Robert Scoble and Loic Le Meur that evening in a bar in San Francisco
Tuesday: Tuesday was a very interesting day indeed. We met up with Facebook at 9am in the morning where we met Mike Murphy (VP of Media Sales) and Dave Morin (Head of Platform) and then we met up with Ross Mayfield of SocialText who gave us such valuable insight into running a startup.
We then went to the Enterprise Ireland event that evening where a select few got to pitch to a panel of VC’s
Wednesday: We headed off to Microsoft in the morning where we met Scott of the MTC who showed us how nicely Exchange 2007 integrates with other software they’ve developed to build this kickass unified communication system. I can’t find words to describe it, you should look at unified communications on the Microsoft website to see how nifty it is. We also got vouchers to use at the Microsoft employee store which is dirt cheap.
Some of us went to Google for a tour of the campus and lunch. I went along happily while carrying my Microsoft bag. All I’ll say about Google lunch time is that its like some sort of organised chaos. Everyone forms queues around different buffet tables which no obvious signs anywhere, wandering around like an idiot I eventually managed to find some food I liked.
We headed off to Ning where Diego told us all about Ning and about it and after a while Marc Andreessen showed up and had a little Q&A session. Very impressive.
Thursday: We met Seth from Meebo that morning who gave us a talk about Meebo and getting funding and from what he told us shows how much he is on top of his game. Its an inspiration to see someone with such motivation and drive (This applies to everyone we met but if I kept repeating that, this wouldn’t be a particularly interesting blog post)
We went off to Yahoo! Brickhouse then where we met with Salim and the folk at Yahoo Brickhouse and we got told about their upcoming products which sound quite nifty alright. We were looked after well by the Yahoo gang, there was beer and pizza provided for us.
We then headed off to another bar for the Irish in San Francisco event which was interesting and then caught the last Caltrain home.
Friday: We met the law firm WSGR who told us all about them and what they could do for us if we decided to set up in the US and what they are offering is very nice for the top tech legal firm in the valley. They are also sending us out their course material for their entrepreneur course which is quite nice of them.
We hooked up with Salim again (after having a semi difficult time to find Yahoo by car, merci to the bench’d gang for being the drivers this time) and he gave us a quick tour of Yahoo’s campus and we met with their head of M&A and people gave a little pitch to him.
We met up again with Salim and Nathan (former tech advisor to the Canadian government) at a pub that evening in Palo Alto and spent the evening there.
Saturday: We did very little that day and took the morning off and headed into San Francisco via the Caltrain where I bought a very comfortable and stylish jacket from The North Face. We wandered around for a bit and then all met up for some food in the Empress of China and then headed back to Palo Alto on the Caltrain and we decided a week long of long days was taking our toll and we headed off to bed… then disaster struck.
While checking emails and watching some crappy US tv there was a burning smell in the air and moments later the power died. I decided to get up and take a look and it turns out the transformer had burst into flames and knocked out power in the surrounding area. We hung about for an hour or two to see cops show up and close off the street and firemen trying to reverse a pump into the alley
Sunday: A lazy day where we got some breakfast and packed our bags and got a taxi to the airport where they are at THREAT LEVEL ORANGE. To be honest I was expecting some hassle from the TSA for having a laptop and various other bits and pieces but just got waved through. Despite taking 4 Tylenol PM I only managed to get an hour of sleep during the flight.
When I eventually got home I fell asleep on the couch and woke up at 4pm. I wish I stayed awake.
I know this post has probably missed out on something and full of grammar holes but its too late in the evening to care.
Is it just me or does the entire bloggosphere shut down from 5pm Friday and you won’t see any decent activity until Monday morning?
It is trend I’ve been noticing at the weekend when I have Google Reader open, I keep hitting refresh but nothing new appears, but if I was to do it on a weekday, I’ll get a new post or two. Maybe someone can recommend a blog that keeps up with posts even over the weekend?
Since Gavin tagged me way back when, I’ve finally gotten around to doing this.
1) I didn’t get braces because I’d have to give up drinking coke. I pretty much live off the stuff so giving it up could possibly kill me.
2) I am a cubical man, I flat out refuse to use urinals. Why I’m not too sure (cue the penis jokes) but I just don’t use them. I’ll go find another toilet instead.
3) Still single, the one person who showed any interest in me (That I was aware of), I went off and called a stalker and now she’s no longer talking to me.
4) I love my sunglasses so much that I’ll wear them at any chance I get.
5) I had something else to go here but I’ve totally forgotten it. My memory can be pretty bad at times, its coming to a stage where I’m forgetting passwords that I’ve known for over a year.
If you’d like, consider yourself tagged.
To see what all the fuss was about I went off and got myself a twitter account here and already I’m loving it. At first glance it didn’t seem to be worth much but now I’m really beginning to like it.
My Junior and Leaving Cert English teachers have both commented on how I work with the policy “less is more” with regards to my essays and pretty much everything else I write for english. And then it hit me.
Usually when I’m (trying) blogging I have one simple idea which makes it into draft form and not much further then that because I feel there should be more there then there currently is. Like I have a draft currently on how I rediscovered I hate clothes shopping so much. Instead of going to the big effort I currently do to flesh out a blog post I could just send a text from my phone “back from shopping, forgot how much I hate doing it” and thats it. And stuff that I considered too trivial and boring to bother writing about I can now do in less then 140 characters.
Time will only tell if I keep the love up for twitter.
So now that its done for another year. Let me tell you what happened that evening.
I texted Damien to see if he needed a hand with anything before the awards kick off. Within minutes I got a text saying show up at 5:30 and then thirty seconds later followed by bring a laptop. Then after a bit of digging, it turned out it was going to be for SecondLife Ah, problem. Since I’m using Vista, driver support is still a bit naff and SecondLife wouldn’t run. Trying an older laptop with Windows 98 it turns out SecondLife doesn’t work on 98 at all! So I popped off to Intel’s site and downloaded the newest drivers for XP which wouldn’t install at all on Vista. Extracting the exe and pointing Vista to use those driver however did work. A reboot later SecondLife was sorted. I put my Oakleys on, shoved my laptop in to my bag and hopped into the car
Slightly delayed from trying to get dinner in McDonalds (classy I know) I arrived at six into the Alexander Hotel with my McDonalds drink in hand. I headed quickly down stairs where I found Suzy who I met last year there doing registrations and a moment or two later Damien came down the stairs and introduced me to Conn (won some awards too!) and Brian who were the two awesome people doing audio for the night.
After getting hooked up to the projector we were good and waited for the place to start filling up. Rick asked me could I set an explosive off in the SL version of the Blog Awards. In fear of the resulting abuse reports I decided against it. The whole event kicked off and awards and raffles were done. You can find a list of the winners here but something that should be noted was that Bernie handed over his award of Best Contribution to the Irish Bloggersphere to Damien instead.
After the awards and the music kicked off. Some things that I saw were
TwentyMajor showed up in person (Or was it actually him? We were debating this). He also called me “pure” whatever that means….
I ran into Tom Raftery later on where I got the brilliant quote from him of “I’d love to offer something insightful and witty, but I’m pissed” That man also has some dance skills.
Clare Dillon can also be seen on that photo in the pinky/purple top. I have never seen so much concentrated and dedication given to dancing before in my life. If we were to time how long people spent on the dance floor and total it up. They’d have nothing on her.
The only picture of me on the night that I am aware of is this. And thats all that really comes to mind at this stage.
Firstly kudos to Damien for hosting another brilliant awards show. Our fearless leader at it again.
I have a draft post currently being composed with a break down of what happened through the night. I’ll have it finished within the next day or two.
For the odd person out there who is interested in installing Subversion using a external copy of apr/apr-util with BerkeleyDB you have to compile apr-util using –with-berkeley-db. This caused me a pain in my face for a good while until I found that in the changelog.
Appearently Microsoft are giving out fairly nice laptops to bloggers but now its seemed to turn into a huge ethics debate about should they keep them or not. And someone has gone off and made a list of bloggers who also got a laptop and what were they going to do with it, looks like the majority of them will keep the laptop and if I ended up in that situation I’d probably keep it too. If someone wants to send out free stuff to me then let them go ahead.
Hell 3000 people in Ireland are going to get their hands on a copy of Vista for showing up at the Technet event in Croke Park a few weeks back. However some people are changing their attitude about recieving gifts like Joel who is now no longer accepting anything.
Although odds are nobody will ever read this because looking at my Analytics account the hits on this site has dropped to zero.
After reading about Hosting365’s free offer to bloggers and taking them up on the offer (Go check them out) I’ve decided to start fresh with a new blog with a new host. I promise this will be the last change for a while now.
You’ll noticed I haven’t transfered any of my previous posts over here. I’ve decided it was clutter and to start fresh with a brand new blog in the vain hope that I’ll get back into the whole blogging thing. Over the next few days you’ll hopefully see a few posts appear on the site.
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