Another Mark Smith?

Last night, I managed to make it to Tag Tuesday, as mentioned yesterday. And I'm very glad I did.

I managed to meet a few people I've been wanting to meet for a while, as well as meet up with an old acquaintance, and meet some new people, too.

I finally met Jonas Luster. I'd been hoping to meet him for a while now. I've been following his site for a while, and lamenting his switch from Drupal to Wordpress.

Jonas (pronounced as Yaw-nas by Jill, whom I also met last night) kept insisting he had met me before when I walked up and introduced myself. I told him we hadn't met, and he said sure we had and started listing conferences he had been to recently. When I told him I hadn't been to a conference since SiGGRAPH, he looked at me in disbelief, and turned to Niall to ask where the two of us had met.

Which is how I met Niall. We talked a bit, before Kevin Marks, who was going to be presenting, came up to talk to me. Turns out all of these guys work at Technorati. Go fig.

As did another Mark Smith. He goes by "Junior", and works at the opposite end of the building from Ian, who noticed my brand spanking new running shoes. We laughed about it.

At some point, I did manage to meet Matt, who seemed surprised I didn't know who Stewart Butterfield was. For those also not in the know, he's one of the two founders of Flickr, an online photo sharing site.

Eh.

I enjoyed talking to Matt, Mark and Kevin. After a while, though, people who knew each other showed up, and those of us not in the clique were left to fend. It was a little uncomfortable, so I made the best of it and talked to other people.

The entertaining surprise of the evening was seeing Dave McClure. We talked a long while (he's at Simply Hired, so we spent time talking about job-posting microformats, the job-hunting online sphere and a bit about community development and startups.

It was really nice to see a friendly face (and an ultimate player!). I don't think I ever truly appreciate how great the ultimate community is in terms of comform, belonging, friendships and networking. Always something to talk about, always a friend nearby.

When the presentation finally started, absolutely no one could hear anyone, and the presentation slides were projected onto the ceiling.

Note to self: do not try to give a presentation at a brewery.

Eventually, everyone clued in, and we headed outside, across the street and talked in a huddled group.

The party ended when we heard, from the Coast Guard alert station right next to where we were, a tsunami warning for the coast of California. Turns out, there was a 7.4 earthquake off the coast of Humboldt county, about 250 miles north of the Bay Area.

In disbelief, we all disbanded. We were going to continue, but Jonas insisted we all notify anyone on the coast that might be affected.

Zoom. We left.