I’m in Cambridge for the first W3C Technical Plenary meeting, along with about 150 other people from many Web-related companies. I had, of course, expected to see many old friends at the meeting — but I was surprised when I got down to the ground floor and bumped into Ian Brackenbury of IBM, who was not here for this meeting but happened to be staying in the same hotel. Since we needed to talk anyway, we had breakfast together, neatly solving my indecision about where I’d eat.
Then, after the meeting, I visited the part of my group which is housed at Lotus (across the street from this hotel). And again, I was surprised — this time by Carol Moore, who was the Webmaster of www.ibm.com in 1995, soon after we first put it on the air, and who was visiting from Amsterdam; we chatted for a while before I came back for the post-meeting reception.
And then I wound up going to dinner with two friends and co-workers from my days in Boca, Andi Snow-Weaver and Phill Jenkins, both of who are now with IBM in Austin. We verified our geek credentials by talking about long-departed hardware (Series/1 computers, to be specific) in the taxi, but then decided that talking about people and food was more enjoyable, and that’s what we did for the rest of the evening.
Then I came back to the hotel, flipped on the news, and heard about the quake in Seattle. I vividly remember the Loma Prieta quake in ’89, and I’m glad this one doesn’t seem to have been nearly as harmful.