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 ]

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.

We all know that water drains in the opposite direction down under in Australia, but their lindy hop (swing dancing) is anything but backwards.

Check out the clip below—including teens and senior citizens—for some crazy fast footwork and awesome on-the-fly (no pun intended) fun moves.

Incidentally, Google Video now lets you rate, tag, and comment on videos.  Nice!

And hey, interested in seeing some other fun clips and learning a bit more about this lindy hop thing?

Anne-Marie lifts unidentified but happy dancer at the 2003 San Francisco Lindy Hop Exchange.

Leave it up to my fellow dancer friends to think up something that’s equally entertaining and potentially useful.

To my non-Lindy-Hop reader friends… one thing you should know:  In general, it’s a major faux pas to wear high heels when swing dancing.  The follow’s balance tends to be off, the guys are afraid of getting stabbed when doing charlestons, and so on.  In fact, a running joke is that you can identify (and avoid) the total newbies by seeing which women are wearing high heels.  Same thing for blues dancing and blues dancers.

But this creates a bit of a conflict.  Often times blues dancers are avid tango’ers… and occasionally, there are hybrid events which combine the worlds of blues and tango dancing.  In tango, it’s apparently quite customary, even desireable for the follows to be decked out in high heels.

So what to do, other than trudging a very large purse or backpack along with you for a second pair of shoes, not to mention having to miss out on a song just to change shoes?

Every month or so during the school year, the Stanford University Dance Department puts on an event called Jammix. It includes a huge variety of music and dance styles... from schmaltzy tangos to goofy covers of American pop tunes to "Play that Funky Music, White Boy!" to Metallica waltzes (!) and beyond. And all for $2, too!

The talent is equally varied. Given that this was the first Jammix of the season, there were even more newbies than usual, but also quite a few impressively experienced folks (including dance teachers!) in attendance.

Well, it's been the worst of times, it's been the best of times, to semi-quote those cliched novels. For those interested in my Lindy Hop and other dancing adventures, read on.

I am so angry at myself.

There are a million and one reasons why I went to a blues dancing practica tonight and only danced one song... but none of them are compelling or rational reasons.

Worse yet was my assedness (is that a word?) towards the later part of the night.

Recently I attended a special weeklong camp for swingers.

Every night we swung in different rooms, swapping partners frequently. Sometimes we barely spoke a word, just motioning for someone to join us, or even just flashing them a smile and a come-hither look. Typically, most of our encounters lasted about 3-4 minutes, but occasionally they went on a bit longer. Sometimes slow and sultry, other times fast and furious... definitely a lot of variety!

This past Thursday, I danced with one particularly amazing follow, and everything was on. She smiled, I smiled, we moved so well together and connected wonderfully. To my surprise and great pleasure, she continued beaming after our dance and complimented me on my "great connection" and some other stuff that I can't recall since I was in such a delighted daze. Here is this competition-winning, well-respected follow that is gushing about a dance with mediocre-ol' me!

In an ironic twist, this particular woman -- we'll call her Maria -- is often sitting on the sidelines, not being asked to dance. And that just seems downright strange to me.