No degrees of separation

I got to sit in on an interesting conversation with Dan Gillmor and a group of News & Record editors and staffers this morning, along with the flesh-and-blood avatars of EdCone.com, Southern Rants, Hogg's Blog, Greensboro Is Talking, Greensboro101.com, and the eponymous Patrick Eakes. What nice people, and what interesting ideas they have about the future of journalism in Greensboro. Most of them had been to the Triangle Blogger Conference in Chapel Hill on Saturday.

Chapel Hill web guru Paul Jones, editor of iBiblio, was also there, and as he and I eyed each other across the room, I could see us both slowly realizing that we were not strangers. Paul knew me when I was a young Classics graduate student, and he was doing tech work for UNC that still involved a lot of punch cards and magnetic tape. Ah, the days of FORTRAN.

I also learned that the Triangle Blogger Conference yesterday was held in Murphey Hall, home of the UNC Classics Department, which is the the place I where spent countless hours communing with the likes of Lucretius, Sophocles, and Herbert Weir Smyth. It is also the place where I first set eyes upon my lovely and accomplished wife, Laurette DeVeaux Wharton. (I ask you, guys, could you resist dating a beautiful archaeologist named Laurette DeVeaux?)

Actually, the consequence of that fateful meeting is the reason I had to miss the Triangle blogger conference. Two consequences, actually; both of them female. I spent Saturday morning with my younger daughter, walking downtown to Simple Kneads and Cheesecakes by Alex, then Saturday afternoon setting up a wireless network for my older daughter's new iMac G5 (and for Laurette's Dell laptop).

In fact, I'm blogging from bed using that laptop right now, next to my lovely and accomplished wife, whom I met in Murphey Hall, where the Triangle blogger conference was, which also hosted Paul Jones and Dan Gillmor, whom I saw this morning.

Small world. But cozy.