Daily Archives: October 9, 2006

After Geek Dinner 1.0 was such a jolly good time, I knew I’d have to approach it the way a network approaches a mediocre sitcom with decent ratings: keep doing it for 7 years, then 5 more good years in syndication.

For Geek Dinner 2 we moved to a different venue (Indigo, reservation courtesy of OpenTable), where we had tasty wine, and if memory serves, all but one person had one of the specials.  As food was served, we did our ’round the horn’ intros (starting on the left):

• Ryan Block (writes for some little blog)
• Veronica Belmont (yes, we have a genuine geekette!)
• Brian Curtis (VC/entrepreneur with a keen eye on China)
• Jeff Hagan (banker in the technology/digital media space)
• Ron “the thinker” Hirson (redefining the telephone and professional kiteboarder)
• Brad Dietrich (builds media streaming technology just for fun)
• Dave Mathews (likes to take on inappropriate bets)
• Jeremy Toeman (consumer technology guru and dinner planner extraordinaire)
• Nicholas Menaker (still not completely sure what he does, but I know he does it well)

This week conversations roamed across the board.  An interesting topic was regarding Adobe adding VoIP to Flash.  Feelings were mixed, some felt it was a move toward getting easier adoption of VoIP (by cutting out install time), others thought it was part of a wider, mobile strategy.  And a few of us guessed it was because Acrobat and Photoshop are already about as bloated as possible, and they only offer so many other products (zing!  ouch… sorry, Adobe, I love your stuff, but why does Acrobat 7 take almost a minute to load on my dual-core laptop???).

Another fun topic was everyone’s “ultimate wishlist gadget” – if money were no object, what would you want for Hanukah or Christmas (or Winter Solstice or whatever)? Answers included:

• Helicopter (a specific model was mentioned, but I don’t remember it) – specifically to speed up commuting, something that makes perfect sense in my book.
• Macbook
• HTC Excalibur
• 50″ Pioneer Elite plasma
• A ride on SpaceShipOne (which didn’t technically count, since it wasn’t a specific gadget, but it was a cool thought)

I can’t really remember the others, but maybe everyone can chime in on the comments if they recall.  One thing was for sure – everybody wanted a Slingbox Pro.  Ok, I’m just kidding, but at least one person did!!!

Many other fun conversations ensued, we laughed, we cried, we laughed some more.  Until we got distracted by the bunny.  Look at the bunny!

As we all left, I walked with Brad to his car to get a ride home, and saw the following, horrible sight:

Turns out Brad accidentally left his laptop case in the footwell of the passenger seat. This means, on a very busy street in San Francisco, between the hours of 7-10pm, some miscreant had the time to walk car to car, peering into the window to find anything that looked valuable.  He also had time to bash a window, reach in, and grab the case and (presumably) run off, all without anyone noticing. 

I guess I just want to know how much more I need to pay in taxes to get rid of the car vandalism here, because I’d fork it over.