I've just returned from spending the entire afternoon at the LiveJournal Memetic Flash Mob Picnic. For those who aren't reading this on LJ or who have unaccountably managed not to have any other friends spreading the meme: some anonymous person declared a few weeks ago that there would be a picnic on Jesus Green in Cambridge, named a precise location and time, and said ‘tell your friends’. The meme propagated widely, as memes do, and quite a few people turned up.

It occurred to me that it would be cunning to bring along a load of sticky labels on which people could write their usernames, to eliminate all the hassle of actually asking people who they were so that everyone could move straight on to the inevitable ‘Oh, so you're So-and-so’ stage. So in a fit of public-spiritedness and organisation, I did that.

As a result I'm uniquely well placed to provide a head count for the picnic as a whole. Of the four sheets of 28 labels I brought along, we got through exactly three, which is 84 labels. Four people took two labels for various reasons, and I counted fourteen people who weren't labelled for various reasons. Therefore, although it is of course possible that I miscounted one or both of those adjustment figures, I can state with a reasonably high degree of confidence that the total turnout was in the region of 94 people.

It's strange how disappointing that feels. At 75-85, we were thinking ‘wow, this worked really well’. But where 85 feels like a success, 94 feels like a failure, because with only six more we could have got into triple figures :-)

I was expecting not to be able to post this now, because my home network connection has been down since yesterday evening. I rang NTL this morning and they insisted that it was a problem with my cable modem, and promised to send an engineer out on Wednesday. Now I return from the picnic and it's working fine. However, I have had long outages like this quite often recently, so I wonder if in fact it is a problem with my cable modem; I think I might not cancel the appointment, let them replace it on Wednesday regardless, and see if it stops happening…