Echoes of Flavio's Ghost Dreaming

Lovely evening spent with the Mac heads of the old u.c.s.m -that is, uk.comp.sys.mac of the old Usenet. (who include of course quite a few geeks, but also an ex producer of 'Panorama' and a magician, as well as other interesting people) at Merkato, the Ethiopian restaurant on Caledonian Road, like every year since about 2000. This started with the Apple Expo at the Design Centre in Upper Street (which is how we started going to Merkato). It went more or less like this: you would turn up, meet with them lot, look around ('ah, yes, there's computers in here'), maybe have a slightly closer look if there was anything interesting but more normally retreat to the Chinese place near, come back, look again ('ah yes, computers still here') and then head off to Merkato for a lovely and amazingly cheap Ethiopian dinner and getting to know better people you'd only met before in plain text on a computer screen. So eventually we gave up on the Apple Expo (oh, ok, the Apple Expo also died at some point) but we carried on meeting once a year in November, catching up on what everybody did in the meantime, maybe greet a few new faces and, also, lament the parting of some old one, maybe in extremis also discuss something geeky. This year our resident magician put on a show, entertaining not just us but the whole rest of the constituency of the restaurant including the people who run it. His name, by the way, is Martin S Taylor and he's very good, if you happen to need a magician. I nearly missed it this year, I was so tired when I came home that I was dozing off in complete oblivion, but one of them phoned and I ran, picked the car and took myself there pronto...

This is probably only of interest to bellajonez, shadowphiar and countb but, hey, just in case.

The pictures of the ucsm meet at the Mac Expo and the dinner at the Ethiopian restaurant which followed, are here