Tuesday was the occasion of the first bots list meetup. The same people as usual, although in a different context: acme, alexr, blech, hex, hitherto, mattb (one of the pants people, who I was meeting for the first time), mbm, muttley, Trelane, Yoz, zool, and a bloke at the other end of the table who I didn't know and whose name I didn't catch.
The meet happened at the Hen and Chickens pub in Islington, mainly because it's next door to Trelane and muttley's digs, and their data cloud extends into it, so you can get bandwidth there if you have a laptop with a wireless card. Which, of course, several people did.
The conversation was of a high quality, and very interesting. However, asking me to remember what people said in a conversation the night before is like trying to reconstruct cinders into a piece of wood. So I shan't. In addition to that, my range of hearing in noisy places like pubs is very small - on the order of about three feet. So most of the time I couldn't hear anything except the two or three people nearest to me. Luckily, Trelane has a better memory.
One thing I can remember, as Trelane mentions, is that I showed him (using acme's shiny iBook) the code I was writing for an IRC bot that will put things onto a wiki. It wasn't in much of a state at that point: I had some code that connected to a wiki, HTTP GET'ed the content of a page and POSTed something back, and some other code that connected to an IRC server and sat on a channel; I still had to tie it together. He told me about his basic bot framework.
After closing time the several of us who were still there went next door - if you were paying attention, you know where that is - and had pizza. Some people played Halo on the Xbox, which I hadn't seen before. Very shiny indeed. (It looked familiar, and I couldn't work out why; then I realised that it was because the game had been developed by Bungie Studios, who did Marathon for the Mac way back when. I can't believe that that was seven years ago, to be honest. I was fifteen. A kid. Hell, I'm hardly an adult now, but still, that was an eternity ago.)
At some late point people started going home, and Yoz kindly offered to give someone a lift. I had code rattling around my skull, and really needed to get it out; zool offered the use of bandwidth and a sofabed in the place in Chalk Farm where she was staying (I guess you could call her an itinerant programmer), and I accepted. Yoz drove us over and then vanished into the night.
Inside the flat, on the lower ground floor of a house facing a church, zool made some tea, set up her laptop (also called yoz - don't ask) for me to use and then promptly fell into a coma-like sleep. I worked on my bot, and at about 3:30am I had managed to get it working. Taking this as a good sign, I pulled out the sofabed and fell asleep, listening to the rain sound like a river outside the window.
