"The Dullest Blog in the World"

My girlfriend - who reads my blog regularly, even though she's not at all technical - just sent me a link to a story in today's Seattle PI about the "Dullest Blog in the World". I'm not sure if she's trying to tell me something - like maybe mine is duller? - but, what it all comes down to is context and perspective.

In the dullest blog, the blogger is "meticulously chronicling mundane events in his life". Dull? Not to a behavioral scientist! If it were truly comprehensive, it might be a goldmine of information.

Software conferences are typically held in conference venues, adjacent to - and sometimes mixed with - conferences in radically different industries. I recall the VBITS show in SF a while back that overlapped an Elvira convention. While some of the developers took notice of all the Elviras (Elvirae? Not sure how to pluralize that) running around, I'm fairly confident we were well under their radar.

And at an Internet developer show in San Diego in '97, we were thoroughly mixed in with a show by the AATB (American Association of Tissue Banks). There was a fair amount of confusion, particularly when I started my presentation on programming Windows Sockets with a slide taken from the other show for a talk entitled "Characterization of an Athymic Rat Bioassay for the Determination of Osteoinductivity of Demineralized Bone Matrix", which was actually happening next door:

Now that sets some kind of benchmark for dullness, don't you think?