It seems like ages ago now that Mark and Stuart and Rob and Mike and I were all standing around nervously waiting for mesh to begin, but it was only a week ago. I have to say that even though I am a bigshot columnist at a big-city newspaper, I was a little starstruck at the calibre of Web 2.0 talent in the room at MaRS, including Om Malik, Matt Mullenweg from WordPress.com, Andrew Baron from Rocketboom, Jason Fried from 37signals.com, Paul Kedrosky, Steve Rubel, Tara Hunt and Chris Messina.

In case you haven’t seen any of the posts by Tris Hussey of Qumana or my new pal Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0, it was by all accounts a smashing success. And much of the success was due to all the meshing that happened between participants and panelists and speakers in the atrium and at the cocktail party afterward — and also at The Drake, where many fascinating conversations were had, including Andrew Coyne talking with Tom Williams of Givemeaning.com about a market-based approach to charitable donations.

If you missed the photos that are up at Flickr.com (tag “mesh06″), I’ve got some here — which I put together using Bubbleshare, fittingly enough, since Albert Lai of Bubbleshare.com was at mesh on a panel with Malgosia Green of Nuvvo.com and Mike McDerment of FreshBooks.com. Included in this series are some of us nerve-wracked organizers, one of Amber MacArthur and Joey “Accordion Guy” DeVilla, and some of Om and Paul and Matt and Jason yakking — including the now infamous shot of Eliott Noss of Tucows.com getting introduced to Matt Mullenweg of WordPress (Tucows has a competing blog platform called Blogware).

I’m as excited as the next guy about the introduction of Apple computers running on Intel chips, if only because it raises the possibility that I could someday have a PC that runs both Windows and Mac OS. And I know that the new MacBook laptops are supposed to be ultra-sweet — but does that mean we have to bow down and worship even the box that the new laptops arrive in? A recent post at tech site ZDNet does exactly that, in an entry that is entitled “Exclusive: MacBook Pro unboxing pics,” in the kind of breathless tone that tabloids reserve for photos of Brad and Angelina on a beach somewhere.

What the post gives you is 28 — yes, 28 — close-up shots of the box with the MacBook Pro inside it, then a shot of the box after it has been opened, and then a shot of the styrofoam insert that protects the MacBook, and so on. After the picture of the styrofoam insert, there is a caption that says “The Styrofoam inside the case has a cool circular cutout pattern.” (Note: I am not making this up). In order to see the coolness of the styrofoam up close, there is a second shot from a different angle. Then there are shots of the MacBook in its anti-static bag, then another foam insert, then shots of the power supply (up close) and so on. And they’re not the only ones.

If there’s one thing that gives geeks — particularly Apple geeks — a bad name, it’s the kind of obsessive and lavish attention paid to every tiny detail of a new product, from the finish on the aluminum to the packaging (packaging porn, someone called it). A blog called I Kew makes another point, which is that there has been little said about Apple’s decision to send “cease and desist” letters to websites devoted to hacking OS X so that it can run on any Intel box, but everyone wants to talk about the cool new products and the boxes they came in.

Freedom of speech? Who cares. But cool boxes and styrofoam inserts with circular cutouts? Now that’s something worth talking about.