Yes, I’m lucky to be a conference whore…
A few people have been emailing me and IM’ing me to see whether I’m going to be attending to ETech.
The answer yes, I am. After some problems with getting a secure channel to give O’Reilly my credit card, my payment has now been received and I’m in! Huzzah!
So if you want to hook up (even if we havn’t met!), let me know. I’m staying at the conference hotel (the Manchester Hyatt, which is actually in San Diego – ???), but my guess is that the beach bar on top of the W hotel will be our unofficial after-hours hook up spot.
I’m brining Choci and Stapes (aka James Shipton and Leo Staples) with me – both repping BBC News Interactive – so it should be a good week.
Sofia and I will also be in San Francisco the week before (26th Feb – 5th Mar) – FactoryJoe is kindly putting us up at the, er, factory (thanks mate 
).
I’m sure there will be a number of geeky meet up events during the week whilst we are there – but again let me know if you want to hook up!
I’m also looking forward to the Carson Workshops Summit which is a rare (and relatively speaking unusually low cost at just £82 for the day) opportunity to hear from some great industry speakers – and Tom Coates.
Unfortunately it’s now sold out – but if you’re going I’ll see you there on the 8th of Feb. I might even get onto the backchannel – but I’ll be on my best behaviour this time!
I’d actually really like to go to Mix06, but I can’t really ask the BBC to shout me for it after ETech, and it’s too long a gap to hang around in the States between ETech and Mix06 anyway. I guess a true conference whore would do ETech -> SXSW -> Mix06 but that’s just ridiculous. I have work to do!
Anyway, I’m off to the London Geek Girl Dinner now (Sofia’s taking me) for even more hob-knobbing…
Actually, it’s called “Teh Langpad”.
Lookin’ forward to hosting you and Sofia.
Awesomeness … I’m going to be in the Bay area that same week. March 1-4 actually. And I think Thomas Mahon – tailor to the stars – is going to be there as well.
There be drinking.
hah…i actually asked about getting a backchannel for @media2006, pointing at the “fun” we could look forward to…
Patrick – you dont need to ‘get’ a back channel.
The best ones are when the audience create and run them anyway.
Just log into irc://irc.freenode.net/ and create a new channel.
Then stick it up in blogs, conference wikis, etc…
sorry, what i meant was: at one point is wasn’t clear whether or not we’d have wifi connectivity during @media…
Ben, why do you persist in this smirky, bitchy back-biting of Tom Coates? It’s making you look like an asshole, and certainly making me think that perhaps you’re taking your own value more than a little too seriously since you faced off against Mena Trott. And it’s actually making me think that perhaps Mena had a point.