Doug’s World

The incredible shrinking world

The world just keeps getting smaller. And it’s so easy to get online and search for people now, especially because many of us are leaving lots of digital tracks for the search engines to find.

When I first set up my personal web site back in ‘96, I heard from a friend I had completely lost touch with 15 years before. JJ Holiday and I went to junior high and high school together in the Seattle area, then he moved to Los Angeles to join a band, I moved to Chicago to play video games for a living, we both got busy, and we completely lost touch. But he found me online as soon as I stuck my head up, digitally speaking.

Now in the last month I’ve had three similar surprises, all people who found me through this blog or my work blog.

First I got an email on December 6 from Richard Brown, who works in the Applied Research section of NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. Richard happened to find on my web site a photo that I took from his condo’s front door a few days after Hurricane Katrina had destroyed his home. His family also experienced Hurricane Camille in Pass Christian, just like Megan’s family did, and like them he said Katrina was much worse.

Then on December 19 I got an email from Byron Huff, the author of one of my favorite golf books, “Be The Target.” He had found me through my blog, where he noticed I had said some nice things about his book. This was pretty exciting to me — “Be The Target” is a book I’ve read and re-read many times. There’s a whiteboard putting drill based on that book which I’ve often shown people, and the whole concept of putting your awareness at the target instead of on the mechanics of your own swing is something I work on every time I play golf. And now I have Byron’s email address, so I can nag him if I have a question about any of that stuff.

And then today, a great holiday-season surprise: I just got a comment on my work blog from Jack Biddison, a guy I collaborated with on a bunch of custom-software projects in the late 80s and early 90s. Jack and I would drive all over northeastern Illinois selling our services, and we also put together a system he used for a traveling auction of parts for race cars.

Some of my longtime friends will remember all the work I did with Chicago Data between 1988 and 1995 — Jack is the person who introduced me to the owners of Chicago Data way back when. I’ll never forget Jack and I walking into John Mengel’s office and sitting down, and John saying “now what exactly do you guys do?” Jack looked him in the eye with a big twinkling smile and said “whatever you need done, that’s what we do.”

Jack must be in his 80s by now, and I had wondered many times over the last 10 years whether he was still around. I remember how he used to talk about the old days of computers in the 60s — Jack, I know how you felt because now I’m the gray-haired guy telling the kids at work about computing back in the 80s. Kids these days, they have it so easy!

One final example of the fun of having a web site: when one of my brothers recently had the annual review of his top-secret security clearance (as required by his job at a major defense contractor), they asked him about my web site. I feel strangely proud.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 28th, 2006 at 2:34 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.