random geek notes

[cellio]

Someone at MIT is doing what looks to be an interesting blog survey. It appears that, even though they ask people to spread the news via their blogs, they didn't anticipate the resulting demand on the server. So it may take a few tries to get the server to talk to you.

I wonder if LJ's addition of tags is going to cause people to change the way we partition our posts. Will we tend toward more-numerous, tightly-focused posts, for the benefit of tagging? Or will we keep doing what we already do and if a post has a dozen tags so what? Time will tell.

Earlier this week Dani and I got email from a friend saying, roughly, "so-and-so from the old net days is in town; we've never met or anything, but how about we all get together for dinner?". This sounded just off-the-wall enough to be fun. The person's name was vaguely familiar (Dani spent more time on the relevant newsgroups than I did), but "put random unknown geeks in a room together and see what happens" can be fun sometimes. (This is different from "have dinner with $net.celebrity", where the participants don't feel equal.)

Comments

Hey! I might be a $net.celebrity!

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

Random geeks tends to have a pretty high fun quotient, but don't knock $net.celebrity.

Many years ago I bumped into Eric Raymond at a con. I knew his name, but graphics weren't a big part of the internet yet, so I didn't know what he looked like. He took one look at my name, said something to the effect of "You're at a con. There's a high probability that you know the jargon means, so I won't bother to ask, but if you don't know, please buy a copy of my book." I responded with "My father worked studied Electrical Engineering at Penn in the '60s, and I work in IT. For years, we've been thinking about a retroactive suit against IBM. If we win, I want an entry and a free copy." He agreed, and we went to dinner with mutual friends. (It was a con after all, and we both know a lot of authors.)