Dave Winer connected the dots yesterday that Philip Greenspun was up in Homer, AK (as am I). I didn’t know Philip, but took a quick look at his site, vaguely remembered ArsDigita, made the MIT connection, and dropped him an email.
In perusing Philip’s blog, I noticed that he had flown up here in his Cirrus SR20. My close friend Paul Berberian flew up here last summer (pretty Alaska pictures here) in his Cirrus SR22 and I dropped Paul an email about Phil. He responded immediately that he was a silent Philip Greenspun blog lurker / fan – I connected Philip and Paul – I imagine they’ll have some bizarre email exchange about airplanes.
I surfed around a little more and noticed that Philip had written a book called Software Engineering for Internet Applications with Eve Andersson and Andrew Grumet. I spent a few hours with Andrew a several months ago at MIT talking about MIT Sloan’s implementation of .LRN using OpenACS (ah – there’s the linkage to ArsDigita). I dropped Andrew an email and he quickly responded and pointed me to this cool song from Ellis Paul about Homer and Alice’s Champagne Palace (which I’d heard before – I think Kevin Menzie had sent it to me – but smiled when I listened to it again.)
Philip responded a few hours later by email and Amy and I took him out to dinner at The Homestead (and no – it’s not in the middle of Beluga Lake even though Google Maps thinks it is). We had a great time – who needs social networking when you have blogs and email.
Dave – thanks for writing a sentence about us yesterday – look at all the good karmic energy that was unleashed on the world!