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Just got back from an awesome fun weekend in Sarasota, Florida.. Lynn and Hao got married, and it was a magnificent time.. Flew out on Friday — sheesh, Florida is kind of further than I thought, it takes like the whole day to traverse the whole SFO-ATL-SRQ trip.. I left the house at like 6:30am and didn’t get to my hotel until around 9pm… 12 hours, door to door. Someone should really get working on that transporter-type machinery quickly.

I’ve never been to Sarasota before, and I can now see why the snowbirds all retire there. It’s gorgeous. Saturday was spent on Siesta beach. The sand at Siesta Key is.. awesome. Hong has a great pic of it.. Supposedly, it’s made up mainly of quartz (99% according to a Harvard Geologic study), so it’s super fine, and incredibly white — which means that it reflects most of the sun, making it cool to walk on. It’s pretty awesome, and with the consistency of flour, it feels like you’re walking around on a comfy mushy surface. If I were designing a beach, I’d seriously just load up on that stuff, it’s awesome.

Sunday, incidentally, was my birthday.. so it was actually kind of cool to be able to spend it with a bunch of my friends in a sunny locale. My friend Dusty owns a golf course in Sarasota, so AJ and I played 9 holes in the morning. The last round of golf I played was last February in Vegas, so yah.. I was a little rusty (not that I’m actually any good when not rusty), but it was still fun. I think I came pretty close to hitting a baby alligator on the 7th hole. He was sunbathing just to the left of the tee box, and since Dusty pointed it out right before I hit, I guess I was thinking about it, and… the ball decided to shank off the heel of the driver and into the pond… Good thing momma alligator didn’t see that. The rest of the day was spent basking in the hot Sarasota sun by the hotel pool with Audris, frolicking in the ocean, and throwing the ol’ pigskin around with Korby and Mcc.

The wedding itself was in the backyard of the Crowley mansion, which is situated right on the water. Halfway through the ceremony, I felt the temperature drop, so I was looking around for the rain to come, but it never did, so the weather cooperated fully. Lynn and Hao have spent the past few years in various places all around the world, so this wedding was one of the most global crowds that I’ve seen… I really wonder how many cumulative miles were traversed for the event, but people hailed from San Francisco, New York, Zurich, Holland, London, China, and Chicago, amongst others… Pretty cool. Though I had aspirations of taking a ton of awesome pictures throughout the whole event, the frequency of my picture taking seemed to vary inversely with the amount of alcohol I consumed, so, I don’t have many pics of the dancey-general-goodtimery that I had near the end of the wedding.

Lynn’s mom was in charge of the music, and she found this live band that was really, really good. I actually haven’t been to many weddings with a live band before, and I was impressed that they were able to play music that appealed to a wide cross section of ages. Lynn’s grandma had a ton of friends there that were super good at dancing, so it was awesome to see them cut the rug to the many swing songs that the band played. I mean, the band didn’t play any live d’nb or anything approaching that, but I do think they did a good job of keeping the energy up and fun. Good work, wedding band.

Anyway.. my pics are here, mcc’s pics are here (he took some great ones), hong’s are here and korby’s pics are available good as well, but he doesn’t like me linking to them cuz then his veil of google secrecy is blown. That said, his picture set is the foil to mine, since his picture taking frequency actually increases with the amount of alcohol consumed.

Good times.

Anyway… as to not be done with the reunion fever, I had dinner with a bunch of OHS classmates when I got back to NYC.. It was awesome to see everyone again. Mike had a fabulous story about Kofi in our junior year computer class that I do not believe I can do justice to on this blog, so I’m not gonna tell it here, but yah. Good stuff.

OHS 1993 RULES!

So yah.. this weekend, I went up to Ithaca for my 10th reunion.. Wow. Like, 10 years.. that’s a long time. Scary. Apparently we’re like old or something. I drove up Thursday with Carla, who had to leave the reunion early on Saturday to go to a wedding that day. Most people got there Friday or Saturday, so Thursday was actually quite pleasant since we essentially had the whole campus to ourselves. Dinner at the Nines was pleasant and crowd-free, and in general, roaming frolicking was had around the campus with nary another soul.

Ben and Michael met up with us for dinner, and then we found Eric and Kevin at the Chapter house later.. It was a little strange cuz most of my college friends were not staying in the dorms, whereas most of my SF Cornell friends were — so I was kind of split up between the two groups… but I guess it all worked out..

The campus has changed quite a bit since we left it back in 1997, most notably with most of West Campus being torn down and replaced with hugenormous “houses” (instead of dorms) each of which had their own dining halls and super fancy tv rooms with like 72″ plasma tvs. The dorm I was in freshman and sophomore year was still there, which was good, since if those got torn down, that would completely destroy the ivy league feel of that portion of campus…

Friday and Saturday were a little more of the same.. Running around campus and Ithaca, reminiscing and trying to capture bits and pieces of nostalgia here and there.. Ice cream at the dairy barn, drinks at ruloff’s, lunch at viva taqueria, drinks at chapter house, drinks in the alumni tent, more drinks at ruloff’s, more drinks at dunbars, etc. etc. etc..

So yah.. good times.

The weird thing was — I think that everyone that I knew didn’t look *that* much older. I mean, barely any of are even married, or even dating anyone seriously.. And everyone else seemed to be old, married, and with kids. As Audris explained.. we’re all in a state of Arrested Development. Which is fine with me, cuz I really liked that show.

Anyway, all of my pics are here.

Woo… yet I embark on yet another trip today.. this time to Chicago. I’m excited, I haven’t been to Chicago since I was there for training with Anderson Consulting (back before it was Accenture) back in 1997. Last time I was in Chicago I was pleasantly surprised, since I thought that it would be more like sleepy Cleveland. But no, it’s actually quite a huge city with a kickin’ nightlife, really great art museums, and tasty food.

I’m meeting up with a bunch of ol’ OHS friends… Brian, Aveh, Jeff and Ryan. We haven’t all been in the same room since like 1993; it’ll be great to see all of them. Hehe.. just surfing around Ryan’s site just now and check out this article about him… nice pose, Ryan.. that’s “blue steel” if I’ve ever seen it.

So yah.. off to Chicago in a few hours… if you have any cool spots that I should hit while I’m there, let me know. Hopefully we’ll catch a Cubs game, and I’ll be able to hit a few more places in my Roadfood book.. Chicago is a Roadfood haven.

I am a little worried about the weather.. it’s supposed to be like 90 degrees out every day.. Am I to wear *gasp* shorts? Eeeek. I don’t think I even own any.

Friday night, I get a call out of the blue from my old high school friend Aveh.. He’s an ER doctor now, and was in town for some sort of big doctor convention. Aveh and his cousins meet up with me at some North Beach bar, and we head over to Supperclub for some more drinks. Determined to give him the true San Francisco experience, we down a round of Fernet and then head for San Jose Taqueria, the best place in SF to end up after a long night of drinking.. It was great to catch up with Aveh — I hadn’t seen him since the OHS Reunion back in 2003..

But wait… there’s more.. So, I’m in NYC now, and last night I met up with some more high school friends, Kofi and Dave, both of whom I haven’t seen since.. um.. 1993. That’s like a long time — which apparently means we’re “old” now, but honestly, I don’t think we look all that old at all.. Kofi is starting his own company here in NYC and Dave is an attorney who recently had a kid (congrats!).. 13 years was a long time, apparently, but it really doesn’t feel like that much time has passed though.

And.. to top off this whole week of OHS re-connecting, Brian gives me a shout-out on his blog..

At last week’s Techdirt dinner salon, we discussed how the new generation of MySpacers will be different than us. As this generation of kids grows up, they will continue to be much more connected to each other than we are. Out of my entire high school class, I only know of two of us that actively blog and IM (hey… if any of you other folks are out there, drop me a line, by the way).. But, for generation M, blogging, IM’ing and connectedness is like breathing to them, an unconscious act. So, they’ll keep in touch with many more of the people that they meet, so by the time that they’re 30, they’ll have amassed a huge network of acquaintances from which to draw. The power of a network is correlated to the square of the number of nodes, so the value of these social networks will finally be realized at a wholesale societal level at that point by facilitating social and business connections that were there, but hidden until now.

Kids these days are using available tools in a way that already seems foreign to even those of us who live and breathe this stuff every day. Hmmm.. *now* I am starting to feel old.