simont | (no subject)

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…

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Well, er, 6 people with LJs were (are) at my thing...

I would have been #95, but a complete and utter car failure intervened yesterday afternoon :(

Yes, I read. Bad luck :-/

I think the performance car owner's traditional reaction at this point is to take this as an excuse to get the engine tuned while it's being rebuilt :)

I'd rather have spent the money on some hifi though.

It would have been nice to see you, Mr #95

Well I turned up v late (post 5pm) with two kids in tow and didn't take a label so that's probably 3 you didn't count right there!

Aha. And

yvesilena says that she and

casby turned up just as everybody was leaving as well, so that might make 99.

But bah and grr. If anything, 99 is even more infuriating than 94 :-)

I was there for about 30s right at the beginning. LNR and mobbsy will verify....

Shortly after

yvesilena and

casby,

aiwendel and

olithered turned up, too. Though I don't know if that counts because we didn't do anything picnicy before going to the pub :)

And now, of course, we just have to try and establish who was there... (:

Hmm, this might help:

http://www.livejournal.com/community/picnic_meme/474.html

So did anyone actually mingle and meet new people, or was it the usual 'let's talk to who we know' thing?

I talked to people I knew well, people I knew a bit, and people I didn't know at all. I also didn't talk to quite a lot of people in all those categories. Simon talked to just about everyone :-)

You were talking to people who didn't have LJs, and were just there to wear pink and mustaches and play cricket :-)

Yes, generally there seemed to be quite a lot of mingling going on, I spent a fair while talking to people I didn't previously know.

The combination of a hen party and a foot long pepperoni sausage was just too right to be missed.

My cunning ulterior motive for bringing the name labels was precisely that I'd get to meet lots of new people :-) (And not, as

atreic suggested, so that everyone would have a good excuse to stare at each other's chests.)

Nice to see you. :)

Definitely. :-) In fact it was particularly nice to see several of the people I normally only see at the Calling, because without the incredibly loud music it was suddenly possible to hold actual conversations with them. Suddenly I feel a need to see more of such people outside the Calling; it seemed to work well.

Also, re cable modems: do you have your own or one of NTL's? We had huge problems with their "upgrades" stopping our very old one working, so we got NTL to give us a shiny new one (since the broadband price is supposed to include modem rental). We've left them now, and they don't want it back, so you could probably have it if that'd help....

Yes, mine's an old one too, which is another reason why I think it's not totally implausible that replacing it might help my problems. However, AIUI I can't just nick yours, because the modem's MAC address has to be registered with NTL before they'll talk to it. (The Gallery recently had theirs replaced and the engineer insisted that that wasn't necessary. It was. They had to ring up seven times and argue before NTL registered the new address and the new modem started working.)

So thanks for the offer, but I think I'll let NTL come round on Wednesday and replace it. That'll also give me a chance to go shopping, which I could make good use of.

I'm interested to know whether anyone is going to admit responsibility for starting the meme now that it's been so successful.