Well Saturday night’s Random Drinks session (organised via Twitter and our blogs) turned out to be a roaring success, with 14 attendees (plus a couple of blow-ins from my IRL friends). As with any event that I’ve been to like this, it’s not easy walking into a large pub and trying to locate people that you only know from small avatar pics or who you met once previously. In order to try and make this simpler, I pinched an idea from the recent Ladies Tea Party and bought some helium balloons to put on our table - making us much easier to find!

As usual, it’s always nice to see familiar faces and catch up on the gossip, but it’s really cool to meet new people and add to your circle of friends. In order to spread some of that wonderful linky goodness, our attendees were:

• George - my hubbie, who is just back to blogging.
• Darragh - hell if I was there, my stalker had to be!
• Niamh - a friend of Darragh’s, who I didn’t get to talk to enough
• Darren - he claims to be shy, but he’s sooo cute!
• RedMum - surprisingly, without her camera, but looking as glam as ever.
• Suzy - the voice of Maman Poulet took a night off from politics.
• Laura - recently moved up to Dublin and throwing herself into the geek social scene.
• Anthony - known as the owner of the coolest gadget there on the night!
• Ben - he claims to not like his photo being taken, but poses all the same…
• Sam - it felt like 20 Questions at the start of the night as we tried to work out if/how we knew him
• Alexia - One of Damien’s “One to Watch in 2008″ list, her blogging has been shit-hot recently
• Niall Larkin & Dawn - who popped in briefly but then left…

The gorgeousness of this event is it’s simplicity - anyone can call a meet-up of the Random Drinks club in any city or town - you simply need to pick a night and a venue, blog/twitter about it and bring something along on the night (e.g. €4 worth of helium balloons) so that people can find you easily.

Two other thought-provoking write-ups of the night can be found here and here, courtesy of Darren and Ben.

Rest of the photos can be found here.