Miguel is in town for ECMA meetings, and the Seattle Mono user's group held a dinner in his honor. Since I was already in Seattle for some other meetings, I decided to drop by. We had some interesting dicussions on the quality of the Linux desktop interface, the ability of open source to innovate, and the ongoing rich client versus web client debate. Any one of these is a decent sized post in itself, so maybe I'll have some energy to expanding on this in the future.

I also got to see Lion Kimbro who I've kept passing in the night at various events. He's started a new blog, which I recently discovered, so I was able to ask him a few semi intelligent questions about some of the things that he's been up to, such as an HTTP Pipe plugin for pyblosxom, and of course his labor on Local Names. Lion's name also came up during the Chandler IRC this morning, in reference to his infamous paper notebook tome.

Vikram Dendi from Real Networks gave me the complete scoop on what's going on with the open source Helix player and the Rhapsody music network. This expanded my understanding from his interview with the Gillmor Gang.

There are lots of people in Seattle who are working on cool stuff. It sure seems like it would be a boost if we could get a large number of those folks together somehow so they could cross pollinate. If you're in Seattle, and you like this idea, let me know. I've floated some ideas about this in the past, but it seems that recently I'm running into more an more people. We should do something about this.