From 3:45 to 4:45 Pacific Time (GMT -8 hours), people will gather at BlogHer to honor the life of Michelle Goodrich, our friend Mandarin Meg. The memorial will be in room 8111 at the San Jose Hyatt Hotel.

Hyatt San Jose
1740 North First Street,
San Jose, California, USA 95112

An IRC chat room named #mandarinmeg will be open on Freenode and friends around the world are invited to join us as they can and share their memories online. We’re sorry that the timing can’t be convenient for everyone everywhere. Late afternoon at BlogHer seemed like a good time for North America, and not impossible for Europe (11:45 pm London, 12:45am Berlin, and morning in much of east Asia and Australia).

If you are not all that famuiliar with Internet Relay Chat, here is an easy way to join up. Download the Mozilla 1.7.13 browser for your operating system from http://www.mozilla.org/download.html.

Install the browser, but don’t select it to be your default.

Open the browser after it has been installed and click on the Window button in the menu bar at the top. The pull down menu that opens has an item near the bottom called IRCChat. Click that and in the text are on the bottom of the page enter:
/attach freenode

after you are attached to freenode you will be asked to idfentify yourself with a nickname. Just pick a one word name you want to be known by and hit enter.

type /join #mandarinmeg

you will be connected to the mandarinmeg room

if you want to give it a try this week and you have problems, just email me and I’ll try to walk you through it.

I’ll look forward to sitting with you next Friday and remembering meg.