Last Week - Blog Meetup
I was too early.
I was host, so I put up my little sign, but Tim (the first to show) wasn't there until 15 minutes after... followed by Shawn (over whom I'm kicking myself for recognizing his face and name and not building the connection in my mind to where I ran into him before until he noticed my bewildered look and said, "You don't remember me, do you?" Sorry, Shawn!...)
Adina and Adam also showed up. I'm noticing conversation is now leaving the realm of small talk and blog talk and starting to get deeper. I think a lot of it has to do with recognizing some of the same faces over time.
A couple of interesting things: Tim and Shawn both had a thing or two to teach me about self-promotion. A while back, I had carefully crafted a personal business card with a cool image that matched my blog's image. However, Tim had business cards (which everyone ooo'd and ahh'd at) and told us about how he actually spent loads of money on martini glasses with his logo and journal site printed on them. Shawn had this very cool/slick translucent black plastic card that was one of those things you just don't throw away. Very nice, gentlemen.
At one point, I was talking about Pathogen (my wierd simulation of how ideas spread in a physical convention of people) and Adam gave me an idea when he told his story about "translation telephone." You know the game where you whisper a secret to one person who whispers it to another and so on... at the end, the final result is wildly different than the original.
It makes a whole lot of sense in my Pathogen anology for the "idea" to morph and mutate as it spreads... perhaps some mutations would cause it to spread more rapidly as people became "immune" to the original idea and less receptive. It could be that the original idea gets SO talked about that the audience becomes numb to the message... therefore the idea needs to be told a different way to be accepted or reemphasized. OR, people might take the idea and build on it to make it stronger and even more appealing.
Interesting...
Here are blog links:
That night, Alex and I had a conversation on the phone about how as we get older, our understanding of the value of our time starts to mature and we begin to understand that it is just as necessary to prioritize the time we spend on the social side of our lives as the professional side.
It got very crass and creepy, but the gist was that we're both finding that we are more and more often unconciously choosing new friends based on what we see as something valuable in the relationship on a more tangible level (ex. I'll make friends with this person because he happens to know a group of people to whom I'd like to sell my idea).
We also decided that it was about time that he and Mike make a trip to Austin (probably in Jan?) to check on my robot progress, among other things (insert sound of beer pouring, here).
