Only in San Francisco/Silicon Valley

I’m very fortunate to live and work in San Francisco and make my way down to Silicon Valley once or twice a week. Geek friends and acquaintances from other locales often tell me that nobody else ‘gets’ why they’re so passionate about technology or what they do for work. That’s not really a problem here in San Francisco.

Last Friday my wife and I were invited to meet her friend’s sister-in-law at a dinner in her honor. We met about a dozen others at a restaurant in the South of Market (SOMA) neighborhood that’s home to many, many well-known tech firms.

I’d only met three of the other guests prior to the dinner, but it didn’t take long for most of us to find  something to talk about. The geek talk began. Here’s a list of a few of the topics discussed:

• A lot of us had recently returned from CES 2011. What did we like/not like. Every talked about the highs and lows of the show.
• The host of the dinner helps run a company that enables HDTV in mobile devices. He was so busy at CES 2011 with meetings that he never saw the show floor.
• My wife and the special guest both work at SAP. Talk about enterprise software conferences lasted for a few minutes.
• One of the guests is a game developer and told us a bit about his company’s upcoming Facebook games.
• The guy that runs Dell’s tablet business was on hand. He pulled out his Streak 5 and we talked about the Streak 7 and what was teased at CES 2011.We talked about Android for a bit.
• The Streak 5 really impressed one guest, who liked it a lot better than his own Android device. He said he’d buy one in a heart beat and probably bought one by now.
• The guy that liked the Streak 5 had his own OS to talk about. He’s one of the guys in charge of Chrome OS at Google. We got into a long discussion about Chrome OS and our experiences with the Cr-48.
• Another guest helps run Gap.com and told us about the evolving nature of ecommerce. He’d also worked at CNet and asked a lot of good questions about GBM and Notebooks.com.
• The host hasn’t had a chance to play with an XBOX 360 Kinect sensor yet. I started to tell him about how much my nephews and I love the thing, but my knowledge of the device was quickly overshadowed by a software engineer that’s hacking the Kinect and looking to build a serious motion controller project for PCs.

Of course there was talk about less geeky things, but this is yet another example of why I tell people it’s great to be a geek in this area.