Dining With the Dead

On Oscar Sunday, instead of going to an Oscar party (I was dying to watch the awards, but Tivo'd them back home instead), we went to a dinner party for members of the exclusive Pho list. I met tons of important people and embarrassed myself, as usual. The worst part was, the restaurant was playing the Oscars on all the TV's. And it was muted, with the captions on. So I would try desperately to avoid it, and then would accidentally catch a split second, and see the captions saying things like "and the winner of Best Costume Design is Sweeney Todd."

This happened more than three times.

By the end, I was exhausted from all the socializing (have I ever mentioned I'm a total introvert?), and dragged myself to bed...after taking one picture:


The Kabuki hotel really treated us well. And Monday morning, I woke up to this:

Ahh.

Monday brought the San Francisco Music Tech Summit, which was attended by many brilliant folks including the founder of YouTube, the former drummer from Creeper Lagoon, the creator of CDBaby and tons of musicians and web people. Quite a meeting of minds.

During the afternoon, we interviewed John Perry Barlow, one of the songwriters for The Grateful Dead. What a thoughtful, intelligent man.

We filmed and filmed and filmed some more. Interviews and panels and behind-the-scenes, oh my! Samantha hosted a panel sponsored by Digital Freedom:

She also played a show at the end of the day for the hundreds of smarties. And afterwards, we were personally invited to join John Perry Barlow (of the Dead) and Claudio Prado, the Vice Minister of Culture for Brazil, for some Korean barbecue. To hear these two trade stories was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Over the course of the day, we heard tons of great ideas, brilliant internet strategies and genius theories, all of which I promptly forgot by the car ride home.