Even thought I was told many times during the evening that I was described as being involved in organising a "rival" (I assume, jokingly), I have to say that the 27dinner held in Cape Town yesterday was great.

Perhaps the largest difference between the February 27dinner and this one was the amount of networking that seemed to be going on.  I think this was a function of many things.

The venue (the hotel training school near the Waterfront) was more intimate and dedicated to the event, and had smaller and better positioned tables.  This meant that you had a potential audience of ten people, instead of the six or so from the previous venue (Relish), and that nobody was in "the back row" behind everyone else and away from the speakers and everyone else.

The speakers were kept pretty short, and more time was thus available to networking.  It also meant that people remained pretty upbeat and willing to chat to people.

I sat with Jaco and Joe, and the others at our table were the MyVideo.co.za people, and later Uno.  Dave also sat with us (and, well, everyone else) between MC'ing (which went down very well).  The other denizens of the geekdom were spread amongst other tables in small patches, alone against the dark side...

Of the talks, Ian's talk on technology and morality (in combination, and somewhat in separation) was probably the most profound, and Mike Scott's introduction to the backstory of Bru and Boegie and the creative process was the most interesting.

As I said, a lot more networking went on - I chatted briefly with Mike (checking to see if he knew Jeremy's brother from his time at Rhodes), chatted with Dave about Barcamp Cape Town (you'll hear more about this after the weekend), also with the Myvideo and Zoopy guys about getting enclosures into their RSS (please!), introduced myself to Victoire (who it seems also works with a friend from Rhodes - hi Zweli), said hello to Henk (who raised over R2k for iCommons), dissed PHP and MySQL at Jacques, and so forth.

Altogether, a great evening, and I think it really shows how wrong the people who made silly comments about how Capetonians are just too cliquey are.