Road Trip to Seattle Lunch 2.0

Friday, Kelly, Rick, Selena, and I headed up to visit the Emerald City’s version of Lunch 2.0 for a diplomatic mission.

Rick was kind enough to handle the driving duties, which left the rest of us free to chatter and OH all the pearls of wisdom on Twitter. After about 20 minutes, Rick went into shock from being surrounded by people tweeting, but unable to do so himself.

This spawned a discussion about a steering wheel keypad with a heads-up display that would finally allow Rick to see all his TweetDeck columns without scrolling.

Our meandering discussion went on like this for about three hours, producing conversations about giant robot arms shredding cars, Teamsters, not stopping for bio-breaks,  brachydactyly type D (a.k.a. murderer’s thumbs), kittens for lunch, food touching, and much, much more.

But you already knew that because you were following our road trip on Twitter.

What? Oh.

Even though we started off a bit slow, we arrived with plenty of time to spare and then quickly wasted it looking for a coffee shop with a restroom.

Josh Maher, the organizer of the Seattle Lunch 2.0 chapter, holds happy hours as well as lunches, and Friday’s was a happy hour. Since we were on a diplomatic mission, and it was a happy hour, Rick brought a gift, Portland beer. He’s such a thoughtful guy, and that’s such a Portland thing to do.

Axios Law Group hosted the happy hour at their offices in downtown Seattle, and TalentSpring, whose office is in the same building, co-sponsored the event. Dawn wasn’t there to get a count, but I think there were about 30 to 40 people spread throughout the office. Then again, I’m not very good at counting, so it could have been more.

In classic Portland style, we included our Twitter handles on our name tags, which drew attention from several Seattleites, many of whom were just making the jump into Twitter. There were also funny references to how happy were were to get out of depressing Portland, alluding to that recent Business Week article.

We mixed and mingled, and as always, Kelly’s LED name badge garnered a lot of attention. I’m pretty sure John DeRosa wants one of his own. I chatted with John, Matt Woodward and several other people. My pea brain doesn’t do well with names, so apologies for not calling out all the good people who chatted with me.

After about an hour of mixing, Josh introduced the gracious hosts, Adam from Axios and Bryan from TalentSpring. Then I stumbled through a “hello from Portland” and threw Rick under the bus to talk about Open Source Bridge, the other reason we headed up there. As usual, he did a great job despite the tire tracks.

Brian Westbrook and Danielle Morrill streamed the event live to Seattle 2.0, and I’m hoping to get the recordings of the interviews he did with Selena and Rick. If/when I get those, they’ll be added to this post.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get many pictures of the event. All we had were our iPhone cameras, and Rick’s nice camera took a header into the CubeSpace parking lot before we even got on the road. In hindsight, I guess we should have brought Aaron or Mark along to snap photos.

After the happy hour ended, it was back on the road; six hours in the car for a two-hour event. That’s dedication.

Thanks to Josh, Adam and Bryan for having us. If you’re up in Seattle, check out the Seattle Lunch 2.0 schedule and the Seattle 2.0 events calendar if you need something to do.

Maybe Josh and company will take a trip down for one of our lunches. Speaking of which . . .

Don’t forget these Lunch 2.0s, coming soon:

• March 11 at OpenSourcery
• April 8 hosted by MioWorks at the Green Dragon
• April 22 at TechShop Portland in Beaverton
• May 20 hosted by WebVisions at the Oregon Convention Center

As always, big thanks to all the hosts who have hosted or plan to host Lunch 2.0. Drop a comment (or tweet @jkuramot) if you want information about hosting one. It’s easy.