Le Web 3: Monday party

The party on Monday was at Paris Bodega. The organizers said it isn’t even open to the general public yet and this is one of the first parties there. It looked indeed quite new and nicely furbished. Not a very big club on two floors. I met some people I knew and also some old colleagues I didn’t even expect to meet, so it was quite fine.

The Paris metro runs until about 1am, so if you start going home around midnight, you’ll make it just fine. They way out wasn’t as easy as one might have expected, though, as the cloakroom people didn’t really use any organized system for storing the coats on the hangers for later retrieval. Instead, it was something like “put the coat on the hanger and randomly stash it among others”. So when people started to go out, it wasn’t that they could just retrieve the coat from among the others based on the number (index) of the ticket. Since the hangers were organized totally randomly, they basically had to do what you’d call a fulltext search for every coat, and so it took several minutes per person to retrieve it. And with hundreds of people, it obviously caused a bit of a chaos. Fortunately, I was one of the first ones to exit, I can’t imagine what it was like a bit later.

Then on the way home, we agreed with someone to share a cab back to the hotel. We couldn’t figure out how the cab system works in Paris, as there were plenty of cabs driving by with their lights on and off, and we tried to hail them, but none stopped. So I suggested we instead take the metro since I knew how to get back. And so we did and talked various business-work-life stuff. I don’t think I said something really silly, but it was a bit silly and I made a bit of a fool myself since I didn’t know the person. We only traded cards when we ended up at the hotel, and then I found out it was David Weinberger (one of the Cluetrain authors and a Harvard fellow at the Berkman Law Centre). This is what happens on the Internet when you don’t see people’s pictures. (His Wikipedia entry doesn’t have a picture, what can I do ) and I hadn’t seen him before, and his presentation on the stage (which rocked) was not until the following day.