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To commemorate 25 years of Interop, the theme for this year’s exhibitor party was the 1980′s. In other words, dress terribly.

Having been born in 1982, I made my best guess at what people wore in the 80′s and proceeded to walk around Las Vegas. Apparently I did something right, as complete strangers reminisced about my outfit and hugged me. The best encounter was a guy who ran over with a huge grin and said “My wife wore that dress to prom our senior year!”

I smiled back and replied, “It might have been hers.”

Eww.

I’m in the pink atrocity on the left. Check out more photos here.

Last month I posted about the panel I moderated on February 24, 2010 down at Google with the IIT Madras Association of North America called the Social Media Revolution in the Workplace. The panel was part of Google’s ongoing TechTalks hosted at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA.

It’s your lucky day – all one hour and forty-two minutes of the panel are now available on YouTube!

We had a good crew of folks assembled for the panel. Some highlights for me:

• Poor Oliver Marks (the only non-vendor) sat squarely in the middle of all the vendors.
• Matt Tucker, CTO of Jive Software told Anshu Sharma, VP of Product Development at salesforce.com that adding a layer of social functionality to CRM  does not constitute social enterprise software.
• Greg a.k.a. ‘Dr. Wave’was wearing jeans with the Wave emblem on the back pockets.
• Anshu figured out what hump day meant that very day (it was a Wednesday).

Got some time to kill? Here’s the vid:

I’m a convert. I’ve used or owned a PC my entire life, but at age 26 I am now the proud owner of a little 13″ black MacBook with 2.4 GHz and 2.2 GB RAM.

Not only do I own this beauty but I occasionally wear skinny jeans and drink coffee from Ritual and ride a single-speed bicycle in San Francisco. Bear witness: I will never cross the  hipster threshold and ride my bike to Ritual to work on my MacBook. I digress…

As a new Mac owner I take even more pleasure in the Get a Mac ads that recently came out. They say marketing is the new customer service – and Apple has really tapped into this mantra with their Genius Bar. Here’s my fave new ad:

I wrapped up 2008 with a 16 day trip to Thailand. I fell in love with the beautiful landscape, the gracious people and delicious food.

I spent my time lounging on the beach and bombing around on a motorcycle though the mountains, and managed to stay completely offline while I was there – OK – I checked personal email twice – but it was so nice to unplug and veg out. I didn’t think about work almost the entire time I was in Thailand, but I observed and heard a few things that triggered some new ideas.

Speaking with Thais in Bangkok, many are worried that Thai will become the second language of the blue collar workers in the city. To succeed in their tourist economy, the ability to speak English is a must. I noticed a few Thai billlboards advertising various products, and a website URL was usually provided at the bottom. The URL was in English, and this made me reflect on how the Roman alphabet has taken over the Web and become the global standard.

Sure there are tons of Romance languages that use the Roman alphabet — Spanish, French and Dutch, just to name a few. But what about the rest of the world that utilizes a different alphabet? The Thai language is based out of the Khmer language!

Because of the Web’s development in the West, non-Latin based languages have had to make do with their .co.th (if you’re Thailand) or .co.jp (if you’re Japan). Even though the website itself may be in the country’s native language, they have to rely on the Roman alphabet to reach their site.

I suppose not considering this before was a bit naive on my part, but having lived in the Western world for 26 years, I’d never given much thought to how the rest of the world surfs the Web. Thailand will remain special and I’m grateful the experience opened by eyes.