Today I met a “longtime reader” of this weblog named Jenn—not my sister but another 2-nn Jenn. She’s in town briefly and thought it would be nifty to meet up.

The act of meeting an acquaintance from the virtual world reminded me a little bit of the “old days” back in the early 90s when Chat Thing (the ddial system that got me hooked on computer-mediated communication) and Telerama (the ISP that grew out of Chat Thing) would hold get-togethers for our users. They were sort of like group blind dates. You never knew who you’d be meeting. That erudite writer you enjoyed debating with could be a 14 year old schoolgirl or a 50 year old geek.

Jenn was neither 14 nor 50, though she is a girl and a geek who started programming in 1979. I enjoyed discussing shared interests with her and her friend Denise at the top of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. Afterwards, they went off in search of a moderately powerful hand mixer. If they find one, I’m in line for some of Jenn’s family-recipe brownies. Mmmmmm!