blognashville party

I think they’d revoke my membership to nerddom if I didn’t blog the party last night. It was fun – Since I didn’t actually go to the actual conference I was just there to crash the party and meet people, and that’s what I did:

Right off the bat, I talked a bit with MMMikey, who later hooked me up with FREE tickets to see Todd Rundgren and Joe Jackson on Monday (score!). I also met Tall Paul, who I had talked to on the phone before, as he’s a recent and seemingly happy client of Swirbo. Talked with Bruce Barry a bit when the Scene folks arrived – he’s as nice in person as he is online. I think he and Amanda chatted it up quite a bit while I made the rounds.

I met the famous Les Jones and his lovely wife Melissa, which I was looking forward to – he’s got his recap of the event as well. We were both there earlier so we sat around and talked as we scanned the crowd for familiar faces that don’t exist. Eventually I retrained myself to scan the nametag first.

Finally met Blake briefly, but he was hard to nail down. He’s here in Nashville though, so i’m sure i’ll run into him again.

Met some of the other Nashville crew: muffy and caruthers, saucylibrarian and a thoroughly unaffiliated (with blogging) friend.

One of the Nashville bloggers I didn’t get to meet was Kevin, who was there, but I just kept missing him.

Also talked with Pink Kitty briefly, who I think is trying to recruit Amanda for some bellydancing stuff.

Talked a bit with Chris Muir, and also ran into my other favorite cartoonists, Cox and Forkum. We talked a bit about our little altercation, but wisely avoided the actual source of our .. disagreement. Forkum, to his credit, was as civil and pleasant as a gentleman should be, and we talked about something we have in common – cars (the new miata, to be specific).

Of course, I also met a bunch of new very nice people, none of whose names I could remember now if my life depended on it.

Had an interesting conversation with Roger Green. Roger is the founder and president of Ipswitch. If Ipswitch doesn’t ring a bell, their two flagship products probably will: WS-FTP and What’s Up. WS-FTP was and is one of the most popular FTP clients around, and anyone who has ever downloaded a pirated copy of Adobe Photoshop 4.0 is probably familiar with the hax0red version of his software (what was that called again? Uhm, not that I ever used it). We talked a bit about Swirbo and open-source software in general. An interesting conversation I may rehash in detail later on the CentreSource Blog.

We closed out the night chattin with Tim Morgan, who was a pretty funny guy, Mr Roboto, and a lovably belligerent drunken stranger who was very good at pretending he had any idea who I was.

Thanks to our gracious hosts for a great time!

UPDATE: Oh, and kudos to to Jacob’s Posse for doing a great job at the door. They only sent me home to change twice and for $20 they let me keep my Gatt.