Tomorrow night I’m heading off on a plane to once again attend a camp for swingers.  As you can imagine, posting on my blog and sorting through my t-shirt drawers will be far from my mind.

Take THAT, Lisa Barrone

Anyway… if you’re interested in all the details (including lots of photos!), visit Swing Out New Hampshire’s Web site.

See y’all in a week or two

[Added to reduce chances of some folks having a heart attack:  It’s a swing DANCE camp, people.  Lindy Hop.  Jazz music.  Sheesh… such dirty minds ]

Unless you’re a fan of the RIAA or a bitter, clueless artist… I urge you to run, er, click, not walk to go hear Weird Al’s new ditty: ”Don’t Download This Song.” [warning: music autoplays].

I’m looking forward to the music video promised for this evening, but in the meantime, you can hear the song in its entirety (and, of course, download it!).

I’ve spent much of this weekend dealing with my blogfeeds.  I have well over 200 (haven’t bothered to count ‘em exactly), and I’m tens of thousands of posts behind.  Some feeds I’ve just had to (often regretfully) unsubscribe from, others I’ve “reset to zero” (admittedly just masking a larger problem), but—most interestingly to me—I’ve become more acutely aware that some blogs have a thriving community and others do not.

Some examples of blogs I perceive to have strong communities:

• Apophenia
• Google Blogoscoped
• Aaron Swartz’ “Raw Thought”

What indicates a strong community on a blog? (I’m not counting “meta” sites like Digg, Slashdot, MeFi, etc., by the way)

• Entries tend to have many comments.
• Commenters tend to stick around over time (there aren’t just a lot of one-off commenters on individual entries).
• Commenters aren’t just “talking” to the blogger, but also to each other.

So, what do you do when you’re home alone on a Saturday night, you don’t feel like going out, and you also aren’t in the mood to be very productive?

No, not THAT .

Why, you optimize your t-shirt drawers, of course.  Exactly!  And so far, I’ve determined that I have:

• 13 Google t-shirts (fewer than half gotten since I became a Googler, interestingly enough)
• 13 dance-related shirts
• 13 other somewhat-decent shirts that I may actually wear (okay, this is weird… I had no idea my t-shirt collection was so bad-luckedly symmetrical!)
• 5 [whew!] remaining t-shirts that I don’t want to be caught wearing, so I’ll donate these to Goodwill (:cough: unoriginal and oft-oversized swag)

A sampling of some of the stranger ones:

Brave Combo is 26-year-old (!) “hot jazz quintet, a rollicking rock’n’roll bar band, a Tex-Mex conjunto, a sizzling blues band, a saucy cocktail combo, a deadly serious novelty act, a Latin orchestra, and one of America’s dance bands par excellence.” [see their bio page] But they kick ass for many other reasons, too.

For those of you with short attention spans, fine… you can skip the rest of my brilliant commentary and go directly to Brave Combo’s music. 
A variety “dozen sampler"(tm) I recommend:  Breslau, Canto a la salsa, Down at the Friendly Tavern, High Bounce Polka, Hokey Pokey, My Tears are Nothing, No Work Today, Spaghetti Twist and Twirl, Swing it Baby Swing, The Hustle, Three Ducks Ondo, Waltz in C Minor,

Aside from the fact that this band is made up of great musicians that play a huge variety of contagiously fun music, it’s damn cool that they’ve made decent-quality one-minute segments of a ton of their songs available on the Web, no?  In fact, their Web site is informative, entertaining, and pretty comprehensive—a sad rarity for band sites, IMHO.

Here are other things that highlight why Brave Combo is an amazingly kick-ass band:

I grew up with snakes.  A Burmese Python named, appropriately enough, “Julius Squeezer.” Lots of harmless king snakes and gopher snakes and more.

You see, my dad (a biology teacher) was friends with a herpetologist, and the two of them would often conduct hands-on educational seminars around the area to help people understand that snakes are our friends, not something to be feared nor chopped up with a garden shovel.  My dad and his friend also helped out the local sheriff by being part of what I called “The Snake Patrol”—comprised of environmentalist folks who’d go out to a house where some person—who had moments ago called 911 or whatever screaming incoherenantly about a deadly snake—was about ready to take drastic, lethal action against a harmless baby king snake or whatnot.  My dad would go out there, put the snake in a pillowcase, and release it into the wild. 

One time, alas, it was too late.  The frantic woman, who had spotted what she KNEW was a deadly snake outside by her trash cans, could hold off no longer.  About ten minutes before my dad arrived, she had repeatedly bisected the critter.  The purely rubber critter I might add.  Methinks that snake wasn’t posing all that much of a threat, eh?

As part of all these efforts, my dad would sometimes temporarily bring snakes to our home, where I got to hold them and learn that they weren’t slimy or (generally) deadly or even venemous.

Plus snakes eat things like wild rats, which are generally NOT our friends when they’re carrying diseases into our homes.

Methodology
I took a bite of the famed whole-wheat Ak-Mak cracker and sips of orange juice in between chocolate nibbles.

Goal
Vital learning in the name of science, with an aim to provide thoughtful, unbiased info to my fellow dark chocolate lovers.

Grand summary
- Villars - Swiss chocolate:  Sharpest (along with Trader Joes)
- Valrhona - French chocolate:  creamest, sweetest, with a noticeable but mild afterbite, fruity
- Guaranda - Equadorian chocolate (strangely labeled “European chocolate"):  smokey
- Trader Joe’s Pound Plus ("TJ") - Belgian chocolate:  thickest of all, tied for sharpest with Villars, faintly fruity, hardest, least creamy initially

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, and—as always—I have so much to say.  I’ll use my recent and upcoming schedule as a crutch for providing some musings and commentary

Last week:

- Monday:  Special Google Event and Hakone Gardens private party.
Early in the day I got to test my Event Planning mettle.  It all came out okay!  No one was electrocuted.  No one went hungry.  No one fell or was thrown off of large balconies.  Reviews were good, and I wasn’t fired.  In the evening, I joined a friendly group of geeks at a private party at the beautiful Hakone Gardens in Saratoga, California.  Free sushi!  Company presentations in the blissfully short form of one haiku each!  Plus prizes, a Futurist presentation, and much more.

- Tuesday:  The Fifth Annual Google Dance and included “Meet the Engineers” event
I was responsible for planning this year’s Meet the Engineers event upstairs during the Google Dance, enabling lots of Webmaster’y-type folks and Googlers to chat informally about largely search-focused ideas, questions, and more.  Overall, it seemed to go pretty well, though I certainly got some good feedback to improve the event for next year (feel free to add more feedback in the comments below if you’d like!) And in the general party there were battling robots, lots of cheese, wacky green-screen dancing karaoke, demo’ing and dunking Googlers, and lots and lots (thousands!) of geeks in various stages of buzzed revelry

- Wednesday:  Search Engine Strategies Conference (continued from Tuesday) and yet more geek parties
The Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, California is one of the largest events of its kind… four solid days of learning ‘n’ camraderie in the Web Marketing / Search Engine Optimization space, with four evenings of networking, drinking, and playful debauchery.  My colleagues sumo wrestling!  Geeks Gone Wild on the dance floor!  And, on a serious but equally important note, it was a great chance for me to meet some fascinating heavyweights in the industry and for me to do my best representing Google… answering questions, gathering thoughtful bits of feedback, and happily putting names with faces ("Ah, you’re THAT blogger...").

- Thursday:  My first speaking engagement on behalf of Google!
My boss, Matt Cutts, is one of the most articulate and likeable fellows in the search engine realm.  When he speaks, people listen!  When I speak… well, I really hadn’t ever publicly spoken on behalf of Google before, so as you can imagine, I was a bit apprehensive and also quite excited.  Making matters even more interesting was the fact that all of my fellow panelists (from Yahoo, MSN, and Ask) came prepared with Powerpoint presentations and I came prepared with… nothing.  Well, that’s not exactly true.  I had spent quite a bit of time thinking about the subject at hand (how Google looks at links on the Web) and was pretty confident about my ability to answer questions… but I certainly hadn’t thought of making an opening statement.  It was a “Q&A” session, after all!

Well, luckily, during the few minutes of the others’ presentations, I managed to quickly shuffle a reasonably organized selection of thoughts into my head and then out of my mouth in a basically impromptu four minute speech.  I even squeezed in a bit of geek humor, specifically a reference to Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” book… which was, to my pleasure and relief, pretty well-received (yay, fellow geeks with good taste in literature!).  I was asked some great questions and had answers for all but one of them, for which I admitted “I don’t know.”

Overall, it was an enjoyable and worthwhile experience, and I look forward to speaking at another industry event.