Let the Men Pee
Yes, there are men here at BlogHer, and one of the first announcements of the day was that there were only two bathrooms in this building—one for men, and one for women—and that while it may occasionally be OK to guard the men's room door so a gaggle of women can avoid the line at the women's room, we can't completely commandeer the place. LET THE MEN PEE was the plea.
Now that the first session has started and everyone's blogging and uploading photos, network connectivity has ground to an absolute halt, so I'm making notes in TextEdit and uploading whenever the network comes alive. I'm posting photos to Flickr occasionally on the same basis.
I've already run into a couple famous bloggers—Tracey from sweetney, in whose backyard we were rocking and romping last weekend; and Alice from finslippy, whom I met in the bathroom—but for the most part it's the somewhat-less-famous bloggers I'm enjoying chatting with most. I was talking with Amy Muller this morning about work and kids this morning when I realized I'd read one of her posts once (randomly, by following a link on another blog). I was like, wait, are you the woman who had an opportunity to get your kid into the dream school a year earlier than anticipated, and were agonizing over whether you should grab it or not? And yes! Yes, she was. So that was neat.
Amy, out of focus (der, yeah, I know how to use a camera)
I also chatted with Ani and Heather (mostly Heather) about deciding you need a change and then moving to a new place to start over. Heather did that a couple years ago when she quit her Bay Area job and moved from Berkeley to Santa Monica, and I've done it a couple times (DC -> NY/CT, CT -> CA, and CA -> PA) myself.
Ani and Heather
At the moment I'm sharing a table with Suzanne, Jeanne, Angela, and Megan, and we're sort of half-listening to the speakers and half-being silly, taking photos of each other and everyone else. (Oh, and Suzanne's busy fixing her RSS feed.) Meanwhile, Marc Canter is being part facilitator, part instigator/heckler by shouting obvious questions from the peanut gallery (q: "what's the difference between a widget, a module, and a plugin?" answer: "they're the same, really. it's just semantics." q: "does that have anything to do with the semantic web?" a: "ah, no." [much laughter from the in-the-knows]).