I'm back home from ETech and there's enough calm for me to blog a bit. I'll make several entries as I can on various topics.

I've known for a while that I was going to ETech, since I was giving a presentation. A few weeks ago, one of the local LA bloggers I know, Sean Bonner, posted a note saying he was thinking of going down for the show. Besides running a successful art gallery, SixSpace, he also is part of the teams running blogging.la and weblogsinc.com. He's probably got a dozen more weblogs, but then again, he has no children to distract him.

I digress. We chatted in email and agreed to drive down together. It's be nice to have a extra friendly face at the big scary conference. I had met Sean once before in meatspace at a wireless meeting and exchanged a bit of email ever since.

So Sunday arrives and he gets dropped off at my house for the drive. At the last minute I learned that he was a vegan. Currently I'm on the Atkins diet, meaning I eat a LOT of meat. He's an artist, I'm an engineer. I was wondering how we were going to get along.

Well, we got along great. We chatted the whole way down and it was good to have a partner during the conference to check in with. We talked aobut everything under the sun and compared notes on events that we were both at, but saw in different ways.

The social dynamics of the blogosphere at the conference were of constant amusement to us. We kept watching how people would orbit the A-list bloggers is some attempt to grab a little meatspace google juice from these people. You could do a whole paper on the hierarchy of the blogosphere at conferences. The worlds colliding of the various blogging cliques was funny.

Sean is great guy and his laidback, easy going exterior hides his mischevious interior. It's a great combo. Sitting quietly in the lounge, Sean would systematically bluejack every bluetooth device in the room. His IRC comments were hilarious and he often had me laughing out loud in sessions, when I was supposed to be paying attention.

So, in lieu of a viable online reputation system, Sean gets the Cruft Seal of Approval.