It doesn't get any better than this: An engaging evening of conversational musings and world-changing strategy planning with old familiar and deep thinking new friends, out in the open air outdoor restaurant at the foot of the Blue Mountains -- such was the scene at Blue Mountain BloggerCon 2004 with Seb Paquet, Dave Pollard and your's truly ...

Our waiter, making her opening conversation ...

Have you known each other a long time?
No, actually, we've only known each other about as long as we've known you.

But you wouldn't know it by the conversation -- it was like the Drawing Room of the Explorer's Club, like old friends re-united, like the war-room of the revolution, it was like that first day in the springtime when you finally switch from heavy boots to canvas shoes and you feel like you could do the 100 in 10; when bandwidth opens full tilt, well, it goes full tilt.

And full tilt it did.

There was beer, good food and friendly service down at the Indian Motorcycle Café, and it just didn't go long enough, although if we'd been more than a few minutes longer we'd have been rained out by a Georgian Bay thunderstorm, so I'd have to say our timing was as perfect as the evening and the company. Thanks guys, positively theraputic.oh the water,
oh the water;
get it myself from a mountain stream
and it stoned me to my soul
stoned me just like goin' home
and it stoned me

Topics swirled on the need for self-revealing web-authoring tools as simple as cellphones, on chaos and change, on who it is that blogs and why it is the other's just won't, on pathways toward ecologically sustainable entrepreneurial economies, on the spontaneous growth of IM in South America, on the role and form of an education for these youth who will be that first generation of beyond the books omni-communications-enabled H. interneticus, on how to bootstrap this new changed world or if it will grow on its own or at least how to foster these parallel networked economies out from under the toes of the industrial-age ... whew

It's more succinct to say what we didn't talk about. We didn't discuss dogs, buildings or hybrid cars. Not that I remember, anyway.