Last night, Dave Winer held the Berkeley Bloggers Dinner #2.

I had a good time and as usual met several new people. At one point, Dave got up and talked a little about his past, his current plans, and asked the group what they wanted to do with these dinners. Meet and eat? Maybe work on a project? I heard later that he hadn’t wanted to get up and talk, but I know that several of us appreciated hearing him give some perspective on why he is arranging these dinners and what he is up to.

In terms of logistics, I think it worked a little better than the last dinner. People were able to move around which is a good thing. The downtown location is good (barring the Cal / Stanford basketball game which affect traffic). The large round tables were a little strange and the karaoke music was a bit loud at times. I dropped enough hints about singing at the karaoke bar, the clearly no one was up for that. 😉
Unfortunately, the attendance was low. Dave had planned in advance with the hotel for a certain number of people to cover a buffet. When people don’t show, someone gets stiffed. We all pitched in more money (at least I hope we all did), but I suspect that Dave got stuck with the balance.

Thanks to Dave for arranging the dinner — I know this is a real value to many people. I hope that the experience with the hotel doesn’t put him off to do more of these. I do think that this dinner was better than last.

Thanks to Tom Conrad for the beer. It is a little known fact that we members of the CTOs of Oakland Startups Club have this understanding about buying the round — I’ll get the next one.

I enjoyed chatting with Enric. Let me know if you want to try out the Digipede Network.

I met Shannon Whitley again. Since meeting him several months ago, he has started blogging. He took exception to some arguments that were made last night regarding technology and change. He may have misunderstood where I was coming from — enterprises cannot throw their investments in the lake; many businesses are five+ years behind the technology curve and that is actually OK.

I enjoyed some banter with Steve Gillmor over Windows, IE, and the Beatles of all things. He is a challenging adversary on the latter topic — he trumps my trivia knowledge considering he actually saw them perform.

And now I’m 3 for 3 in meeting someone who uses FreeBSD at one of these events.