Wayne D's Blog

Things didn't quite work out as planned, this blog post is coming a few days later than planned. Wednesday night I ended up going to the Marlies game right after work. The game ran longer than expected so I didn't get to the second day Mesh afterparty until almost 11. The only good thing was that it was a cool Wednesday night and after I decided I didn't want to drop $10 for parking on an unsure party I pulled around the corner and found a parking lot where the attendant appeared to have deserted his post. You have to love free parking.

When I first walked into Rockwood I thought I had missed everything, the room was almost completely deserted, after poking around a bit I realized tthere was an upstairs where the party was in full swing. The lack of draft beer meant I had to switch to Scotch. I wandered the room, ran into Leah who had earlier followed me on Twitter. We had a nice chat and then we separated to continue to work the room. I must have looked a little lonely because a woman and her golf playing friend came over to talk to me. We talked about social media, we talked about golf simulators and by the time they left the room was almost empty.

You may be wondering why I didn't mention anything about the sessions I attended yet. I caught on moving beyond relational storage presented by Avi Bryant, iterative design strategies with Daniel Burka, John Resig's jQuery and Leah Culver's oAuth sessions. Though they were all fantastic but my favourite part of MeshU was the chance to talk to other people between the sessions and at the parties. I have about half a dozen new people I follow on Twitter and may end up at a Ruby conference later in the summer. On a separate note I'm thinking of attending Gnomedex this summer too.

I'll definitely be signing up to attend both MeshU and Mesh next year and if you are at all interested in the web and social media I'd suggest you check out the schedule next year and see if there is anything that interests you.

I never got a chance to thank Amber MacArthur in person, may be next year.

I almost forgot to add that I found twemes.com gave more complete results than summize.com when trying to search for posts tagged with Mesh08. Telling point for me was that my posts showed up on twemes.com and not summize.com

Somehow i forgot to tell my faithful readers that my little web video won me a free ticket to Mesh U. It was a very productive day, I met tonnes of interesting people and next year I am paying to go. As conferences go it's great value. Thanks to CommandN for running the contest and for giving me the prize. The presentations were great, people kept asking me about my EEEPC and someone even accused me of being a microcelebrity. I aspire to microcelebrity status so that was quite gratifying. I regret that I didn't register for Mesh before they sold out, I won't make the same mistake next year. The one good thing is that my Mesh U badge will get me into the afterparties for the next few days so all is not lost. I hope to meet Amber Mac and thank her in person tomorrow.

I bailed on the after party at the Drake after smoozing for an appropriate time to attend the Marlies game at the Ricoh. The Marlies unfortunately did not prevail over Chicago. After I dry out I will write more about Mesh U but for now I wanted to give my first impressions.

Having previously blogged about my trouble find shoes I felt my twitter friend Shopping Notes notes pain in her most recent blog post Who’s Wearing Christian Louboutin?
as she recounted her unsuccessful shoe shopping trip. This is where the dumb as a post computers take over. Her blog host wordpress.com includes links to possibly related posts. On e of the links was to another blog article HAUTE Style: Beyonce’s Studded Tootsies. A cookie for out byte based friends here, the article does mention Christine Louboutin. The first pair of shoes mentioned in the posting are a pair of studded boots Beyonce was pictured wearing. The blog post has a picture of a pair of the boots in pink which linked to stylefinder.com.

. I thought it it would be amusing to send the picture to shopping notes as a suggested footwear option. I clicked the image which took me to stylefinder.com and informed me "The Ariella Studded Boots by Christian Louboutin has sold out. This is Stylefinder.com's closest match."

I may not be a fashion mavin but I'm not sure I would recommend the fringed Muks to someone who was looking for a pair of hot pink studded boots with high heels. I suspect that a person didn't make this fashion suggestion. Computers are good with words but not so good with images.

I forgot to add that it also suggested that if I liked the Muks I would probably also love a hot pink bandeau bikini and pink flip flops. Click either image and you'll see what I mean.

OK, so last week I get an email from my brother. It's one of those joke emails but this one was different, it was funny, at least in my opinion. I showed it to everyone in my house and they thought it was funny too. I forward to the mailing list of my drinking buddies, where it was held for moderator approval because it was too large. It hasn't shown up yet so I suspect he thought it was inappropriate content for a serious mailing list. Information wants to be free and in the interest of information freedom I am reposting it here. Do you know how hard it is to get an HTML email into a b2evolution blog? I know the formatting sucks but I have wasted enough time this afternoon trying to bang this square peg into a round hole.

FEEL LIKE WORKING TODAY ???

I was hanging in twitter yesterday when I came across a tweet from Jason Calicanis telling us he was online and talking about Powerset's new semantic web search product. He issued a challenge, come up with a blog post comparing Powerset with Google and he would give out a sexy Mahalo mug. Being the swaghound I am I couldn't resist. My question was "How much does a Loonie weigh"? First result is from Powerset, the result an epic fail, The first four results don't contain the answer, the fifth does.

Result two is from Google with site:wikipedia.org to limit searching to Wikipedia. Result, epic pass. The first result is the same as result 5 from Powerset and contains the answer.

Result three is the gold standard, a search on Google for the answer unfettered. First result is the question, second result is the question answered. The best part is that the results marked with the check contain the answer in Google's synopsis, no need to even go to the page.

Ok, Mr. Mahalo, I'm ready for my mug now.