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May 17, 2004
Dinner and a Website
On the evening of May 10, after sorting out my room’s Internet access and taking that unfortunate swim in the hotel pool, I brought my laptop down to the bar for a beer and a blog. Elizabeth Quat of the Internet Professionals Association was already there, having a meeting with Bangladeshi ICT Minister Moyeen Abdul Khan. I briefly said hello and chatted with them, but let them get back to their meeting, while I spent the next hour blogging with a beautiful sunset over the East Lamma Channel outside my window.
Around 6pm, everyone who’d arrived at the hotel for the conference gathered in the bar for cocktails, followed by dinner in the main restaurant. It was wonderful catching up with each other; the last time we’d been together was at the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva last December. Dinner itself was mostly western food, so it was a little disappointing, but we discovered a sinful pleasure on the dessert platter – multicolored wafer cakes shaped like hamburgers , stuffed with different cream fillings. Granted, they weren’t exactly a classic Cantonese delicacy, but they certainly were satisfying.
Since several of us were still on western time zones, we found ourselves getting a second wind just before midnight, so I invited everyone to my room for a night cap. Everyone briefly swung by their rooms to get their drink of choice from their mini-bar, and we hung out until around 2:30, continuing the reunion that had started earlier that evening. We took advantage of the Internet access and the giant plasma screen by showing off our favorite websites. I disturbed everyone by giving them a tour of the collection of punk kitten music videos at RatherGood.com, while Suzanne Stein put us all to shame with her vast collection of cool sites. Strindberg & Helium, a Flash animation site depicting the Swedish artist with an imaginary pet helium balloon, was downright bizarre, while another site about a woman so obsessed with Billy Bob Thornton she’d edited herself into video clips of his movies was simply hilarious. Marcelo Sant’Iago of Brazil then brought along a flash memory stick of photos he’d taken when we’d all first met in Dubai; since each of our rooms included a private multimedia server, we ran a slideshow of the photos on my plasma screen while my laptop played a varied selection of songs from iTunes. As had been the case in Dubai, it seemed we’d be in a pattern of working for 12 to 15 hours a day, then enjoying long nights over drinks and story telling. I’d really missed these guys.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at May 17, 2004 5:51 PM
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