Quick hits from Influence 2006

A number of things arising from Influence 2006 that didn't fit into other posts:

• It was good to meet William Pramana of the William Computer Blog, which he told me has ranked as high as #9 on Technorati. Duncan kvetched elsewhere about how many of the sessions at Influence were glorified product pitches, but my experience was that that was true mostly of the consumer stream, which William attended throughout and no doubt got a lot out of for his product-focused blog, whereas over in the enterprise stream the issues got debated a lot more strongly.

• Duncan Riley linked a piece on Threadwatch mercilessly attacking an Australian IT article on search engine optimisation by Simon Hayes. Another blogger calls the article "trash". Simon is a good journalist, but it looks like he got this one a little skew-whiff. One of the Threadwatch commenters even hints that the quoted SEO expert is connected to News Interactive. It may seem I'm picking on the Oz given the previous post about Stuart Kennedy, but it just seemed timely to point this out as, in Duncan's pithy portrayal: "More proof that Australia is out of touch".

• The main reason that I consider Influence 2006 to be an unqualified success is the poker night on Sunday, in which yours truly beat a table of ten including thrashing Phil Sim himself in heads-up play. We all started with 450 chips and 5/10 blinds, but I kept on getting dealt rubbish and folded until the blinds quickly hit 100/200. The first time I had to post the big blind of 200 I got a pair of 7s, went all in and won, and never looked back. Phil had won a big early hand with pocket aces and so was the chip leader going into the end game, but it was too easy to bully him out of pots with raises that he couldn't stomach. My evil eye technique was working a treat. Finally, as Phil's previously mountainous chip stack had dwindled to foothills, it came down to him going all-in with 10/4 offsuit, and me holding A/Q of hearts. I called, Phil saw he was dominated, and had that sick look of despair written all over his swarthy dial. The flop paired his 10 and gave me no love, then the turn was also a blank, and Phil thought he was still alive. Then the river... an ace! Victory was mine. If only it was as easy to part customers from their money as it is to take poker chips from Phil...