as days pass by

So, on Saturday, there was a “pre-SXSW” meetup in London. It was a beer session for some of the top web guys in Britain, and me as well :) In attendance were: Jeremy Keith – Richard Rutter – Simon Willison – Patrick Griffiths – Ian Lloyd – Dunstan Orchard – and Andy Budd. A few other people couldn’t make it, but we had a whale of a time anyway.
Beer was drunk, as can be seen from Simon’s snapshots – more shockingly, we went to the Apple Store in Regent Street. This isn’t shocking given the list of attendees; aside from Patrick (a Windows XP guy) and myself (Ubuntu Linux), they’re all Mac users. (Simon, in his defence, swaps about between operating systems, but tends to live more on a Mac.) So they all loved the idea of going. Me…I felt like a class traitor. “We are pilgrims in an unholy land“, as Dr. Henry Jones (Sr) said. It was pretty full, and pretty full of people who were all keen to get some of that Apple goodness; the queues to buy stuff were long. Having spent some time looking at all the gear, and particularly fiddling about more with the OS, I still don’t see myself with any particular need to use Mac OS X. There are a few nicenesses in there, and they are ahead of the game in areas including those nicenesses; configuring multiple monitors is really neat, for example. QuickSilver is also a heartily cool application for those who know their own computer well. But it’s still proprietary; as Mr Ben said in a thread on the LugRadio forums: “I don’t need to try OS X, because I know without trying that it is a closed source, proprietary operating system.” He’s quite right. A few extra snazzy bits don’t overcome my philosophical objections.
Anyway, aside from the visit to the Apple Store, we found a nice (and cheap!) pub (with a Cock Recharging Zone), ate dinner in the horrifically trendy Busaba Eathai restaurant (which was very tasty indeed), and everyone complained that my book isn’t out yet. I’m working on it. Shouldn’t be long now. I wrote the final appendix yesterday, and we’re well into the final editing process. Not long to go!
It’s thoroughly cool seeing all these people. They’re all off to SxSW and I’m not, but it’s great to see that there’ll be a British invasion to the conference, especially with Jeremy, Andy, and Dunstan all speaking or on panels. The BritPack. Cool. Let the domination begin!