Belated C4 words

0xC4 == 196, which is roughly the number of Mac laptops I saw there. I gotta get me one of those. Jokes aside, there were actually 98 attendees, which seems somehow related to 196...

Summaries of the presentations have been posted all over, so I'll just relay my personal experiences. One thing that I noticed was how accessible everyone was. Nobody cared that I don't have any apps out there, or that I asked a lot of stupid questions. A good example would be Wolf Rentzsch. Here's a successful consultant type who's forgotten more than I've learned, and is still totally easy to talk to. I hope I'm that nice when I'm rich and famous. Thanks again, Wolf, for the whole show!

Bob Frank is another good example. Snakebite himself. I chatted with him several times, but he's more into Java, so we didn't have a lot in common. Still, he was more than happy to answer stupid questions.

I also got to chat a bit with Gus Mueller. I had to raise my voice a little because he's approximately 8 feet tall. I think the people insulting him on his blog lately don't know just how big this guy is. Seriously, don't mess with Gus. Nice guy though, and it must have been a good feeling to see at least half of the presenters using VoodooPad.

Speaking of tall, I met Aaron Hillegass. WTF! I was looking up at him even when he was on the other side of the room. Another nice guy. I had fun telling him all about how I hadn't read any of his books, and never heard of the ranch and boot camp, etc.

Actually, that was a recurring theme for me. Hopefully by next year I'll have more experience with some of the awesome apps these guys write. One app that caught my eye was Knox. Marko Karppinen was sitting at my table on day 2, and he showed me all the cool stuff it does. If you need encrypted disk images, give it a shot.

Another guy at my table was Travis Cripps. They say you gotta watch out for the quiet types, and that's him. He knows his stuff, keep an eye out for his apps.

I talked quite a bit with Chris Patterson. Sadly, Chris is currently writing non-Mac code. We met up with one of his coworkers, Daron something, at Jak's Tap after day 1. That was awesome, because we're all former PowerPlant geeks. Beer, multiple inheritance, stack based classes, beer, polymorphism, RTTI, beer. The chicks were diggin it.

That reminds me of the only thing I regret about C4. On day 2 there was a guy sitting behind me who spoke up after every single presentation. Normally I wouldn't have remembered him, but the thing is- he didn't ask a single question. It was always some comment or suggestion or polite disagreement. I kept wondering who this guy was, who seemed to know just as much or more about every presenter's topic. So I glanced at his name tag and googled him after it was all over: Ben Artin...

Hey, that's funny- his pgp key is right next to meeroh's key on the keyserver. I haven't heard from meeroh in a long time. If you've written more than 3 lines of PowerPlant code, you probably remember meeroh from comp.sys.mac.oop.powerplant. Most of the questions I had over the years were answered by him, sometimes in a previous post, sometimes my own. That dude was smart as hell, wouldn't it be great to meet him...

Oh, look- meeroh changed his name to Ben Artin.

Dammit! That was meeroh! 10 feet away from me all day. No wonder he seemed to know so much. He did.

So, I didn't meet meeroh/Ben. Maybe next time. But I did talk to lots of excellent coders, and had a blast. Quick shouts to Paul Kafasis, John Gruber, Steve Dekorte, DB, Daniel Jalkut, Brent Simmons, and Ed, Mike and Kevin from Apple. Hopefully I'll see all of you again next year...