While I'm being a boring inane weblogger here I want to make sure to mention Newton Chan. This guy is stalking me. Every conference and user group I attend he's at -- seriously. I remember him coming to conferences I was at eight years ago and I keep bumping into him at tons of events. That freaks me out.

Oh? He teaches computer science at Foothill College? Oh? He is the chairperson for the Tech Development SIG of the Software Forum? Well, OK, then, he can keep stalking me. But, I'm sure he sees through this whole "weblog will change the world" hype. After all, he teaches Java. That wasn't overhyped, was it?

Just kidding Newton! Nice seeing you again and if I can help you in your classes or at the Software Forum, let me know.

If you thought dinner at the Emerging Technology conference is a bore, you definitely won't want to know who I met before dinner. Just David Hughes. He's 75. He's just a boring old guy who put wireless on Mt. Everest. Here, the boring old New York Times wrote about his efforts to do that (sorry, you gotta pay now to see that article). Here's a WiFi Networking News bit.

Heh, I love his quotability too. "Everyone runs around saying, 'oh, 802.11a -- isn't this wonderful? Bullshit."

He's my new hero. I hope I'm doing something 1/50th as relevant and as interesting when I'm 75. Nah, I'll probably just be sitting in an old-folks home with Chris Pirillo saying something like "hhheeeyyy Chris, remember the good old days when people thought weblogs were hot?"

Oh, don't get Dave Hughes started talking about Hedy Lamarr, by the way. He was in love with her. You can see she was quite a looker. She also invented the first frequency hopping system (the precursor to WiFi/802.11).

I'm sure a few of you who really know Hughes are saying "Scoble, you got it all wrong, Dave's not a bore." I know. I'm just playing with the "anti-weblog" folks who think that you can't learn anything or teach the world anything by writing ASCII characters into a little box and hitting post.

If I were going to make fun of the weblogger world (hey, it's overhyped and it's an easy target, right John Dvorak?) I might make fun of webloggers who go to dinner with other webloggers and then weblog about it.

I mean, how original can that be? And how lame.

After all, who cares whether or not I had dinner with Doc Searls, Glenn Fleishman, Ross Mayfield, Steve Gillmor (he has a weblog, but I was too stupid to write down his new address), Howard Rheingold, David Isenberg, and Kevin Marks? (And at least three other people who I'm sure I've pissed off for the rest of their lives because I forgot their names).

I'm sure none of you care that we ate at E&O in downtown San Jose, or that I shared my Ahi Tuna with David, who gave me half of his duck. Don't even try to pretend that you're at all interested in what Steve Gillmor is doing at CRN magazine now, or that Howard invited me to join his mailing list. Nah, all that is too self-centered, isn't it?

Oh, don't worry, you didn't miss much, even if you do care. It was just small talk like "should Ross be afraid of Microsoft?" (He's the CEO of Socialtext -- please don't check his little boring company out, if he's already worrying about Microsoft he must not be doing anything interesting). Of course, what do I know? I just took a job at Microsoft cause I couldn't do anything interesting on my own either. Like one guy over on Joshua Allen's weblog said "Scoble's just a nobody." I really couldn't argue with him. We all had a good laugh about me being mentioned in the Seattle Times yesterday. "Weblogger of note?" Heh. Do they know that only 16 people read me everyday? Did they know that of those 16, most think I'm a fool and come here just to see what kind of inanity I'd post today?

Nah, nothing really was interesting at this dinner. Just a bunch of geeks having dinner together. There was so little of interest happening that no one even tried to warchalk the place.

Howard didn't tell us much of anything about his next book idea. Steve didn't give us any insights on the tech industry. David didn't help us avoid looking stupid when we were trying to decide who would go in which car. Glenn didn't pull out any cool wireless gadget. Doc proudly showed off his son, and that was probably the highlight of the evening. Of course, I'm wondering to myself why you are reading this far anyway. Especially if you're a guy who thinks weblogs aren't important anymore and that the hype is over. Hi John Dvorak -- I love how you deconstructed the weblog movement!

Yeah, it's over all right. Just move on along. This was all a nice exercise. At least I finally had a decent duck meal. Heh.

Paul Ferrill posts about the Novell Brainshare conference.