God, I am so antisocial shy. Here I am in the middle of Partyville, USA and I’m up blogging in my hotel room looking out the window.

the view from my room

I’m here for work, not play, and I’m by myself. It’s different. The plenary session/speaker and the education at this conference has been very good so far but this crowd is not my normal demographic, fer sure. At my work I am shunned as being too liberal – here at this conference I look like I’m to the right of Attila the Hun. Geeeezus. Context is everything.

Also, this is a non-profit thing. These people have MONEY. Big Money. Where does it come from? They are all heavily into fund-raising – it’s what most of the vendors here are about, and they’ve promoted it to a fine art. It’s a different (and fairly interesting) world.

At lunch today we picked a place to eat by topic. The tables were labeled with various geeky subjects and a conversation leader. I wanted to know a little more about Twitter because I use it, but badly. I wanted some ideas to take back to the fogeys at work. The Twitter table was all women. It was an informative group conversation and I learned a good bit about the subject at hand.

Also, I had a weird reality check. My online life is separated between work and personal. I don’t mix the two except by accident. We talked about that a little bit and a couple of the younger women were offended. They asked, voices rising, “How can you be authentic in either place?” Interesting thought. Possibly a little naive, though. None of them do any stream of consciousness blogging AND none of them work for stiff old right-wing farts who can barely use e-mail and would crap themselves if they surfed some of my links. Also, I’ve been doing this as long as some of them have been out of diapers. Lots of history if you know where to look. This particular blog only goes back three years but I’ve been keeping one since the mid nineties when it appeared on the horizon. What a trailblazer I am!

But these young women were dead serious and passionate about always being their authentic selves online, saying that’s the key to building online communities. You can’t lie because there will always be someone to call you on it. I prefer to think about it more like schizophrenia. I have two personalities. One is the geek at work. And the other is the, uh, geek who blogs. Wait! No, I talk about sex and spout off when I’m annoyed with work in the blog, don’t do that much at work. Wait, yes I do. Hmm. Okay, I’m more selective with whom I share at work. Out here, my arse and dangling participles are hanging out for all to see.

Another interesting tidbit from the Tweeter luncheon table – one of the women works for a non profit in Slidell which is just down the way a piece. She said that during the Hurricane, the only communication they had was texting. The cell phones wouldn’t work, the computers were down, but the text messages still got through. That’s something to bear in mind when you make a disaster plan.

So, anyway, here I am, yeah, doing the same old thing, but at least I’m in a different place. That’s good. [Except for the fucking plane rides and interminable tarmac times. Seems there was a storm and Dallas/Ft. Worth cancelled 700 flights … I caught the tail end of that on my way through. Fucking airplanes. ]

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Here’s some stuff from the speaker this morning, David Pogue. You can’t really see it but you can hear it clearly (and also hear me laughing in the background) while David plays the piano and sings My Way with his own words, all about wanting/needing an iPhone. It’s funny! David Pogue being the plenary speaker was the reason I signed up for this conference. I love him. We even tivo’d his NYTimes videos. He has great consumer tech information presented in a really entertaining way. If you’ve never watched him, try it, you’ll like it. This is a nice little review, non video about video: “Camcorder Brings Zen to the Shoot”
Now I have to buy one. I was going to get a new monitor, but now I think a Flip camcorder is in order.

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UPDATE Friday night: I just ate dinner with some sales dorks but decided against partying with them. So, besides being shy, I’m picky about with whom I share my time.