Digressions and doings...

Galina and I left for the airport late enough so that any delay on the roads would've put us - or more precisely, Galina - in the hurt locker, but we lucked out, traffic-wise (and later, I found out the flight to Houston was delayed an hour, to boot).

In any event, I decided to combine ain intended trip to Greenwich Village with a swing past wherever LJ friend rm might happen to need the services of someone (moi) with a video camera, and came away with several profound impressions.

First, that my previous two forays in Manhattan in a car gave me a completely wrong idea of what it means to take a car into the City. It's one thing to park "after hours" or to noodle down around SoHo; it's something else again to bop around the Flatiron District during business hours. I was fortunate to find an unoccupied metered space in Gramercy Park.

And though in the end I abandoned today's effort to get down to the Village, I did manage - after several coordinative phone calls - to meet one of (if memory serves) my earliest LJ friends, rm.

Dig it: Ever since taking my baby steps in this electronic medium, I've looked forward to meeting the people with whom I have come into contact. Some of it had to do with business, as in the time I returned to Florida by car from Toronto via New Hampshire to visit the offices of BYTE magazine and meet some of the editors I had come to know on BIX, an online service that had just been launched publicly. In another instance, I turned a face-to-face meeting with Dave Thomas, who ran the Model 100 SIG on Compuserve, into a paid article in PICO magazine.

But my interest in meeting people is far from mercenary. Regrettably, an explanation of that interest would involve a lengthy digression that includes me sitting in front of the television as a kid, with a jar of Bosco chocolate syrup next to me. Maybe someday...

Anyway, to date, of my LJ friends, I've met (briefly) tsarina in Austin, brenk in Switzerland, and rillifane in Dallas. Today, and it's not as if I'm counting coup, I met rm in person, in Manhattan.

LJ friend rm was... more diminutive than I had imagined, but fully as... elegant, though that may not be the right word. We chatted for a few minutes, after which I placed my video camera at her disposal, and we said our farewells (hopefully not for the last time).

* * *The road home was fraught with delays due to - what else? - traffic. Probably the only traffic-free section was the upper deck of the 59th Street Bridge. I hemmed and hawed the car down Queens Boulevard and eventually got onto the Long Island Expressway.

Outbound traffic on the LIE rarely ever came to a complete stop, but never got going, either, until I got off at the Northern Parkway exit just short of my habitual Glen Cove Road exit. I figured I might as well stop by the Micro Center in Westbury, just to see what there was to see. While it was not exactly a Fry's, I did note the store's strengths for future reference.

They even had an Eee PC on display (but none in stock!), which allowed me to spend a few minutes getting familiar with the unit. The keyboard is, as everyone notes, pretty small and not useful for touch-typing (unless you have really small hands!), although otherwise, the unit's response (near-instant bootup and application launch) is pretty impressive.

After my visit, I retraced my route up the Meadowbrook Parkway and got back on the Northern State, headed east, toward the 107 exit. I stopped by the Whole Foods Market that's near the exit and made my way through the aisles at my leisure, and not with the impatient pace of someone with places to go and people to see. Upon returning home, Shiloh seemed to sense a change in the wind. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, the battery on the BlackBerry gave up the ghost.

Tomorrow, I shall have to apply myself to the work that's on my plate. The last three days of inactivty will, I fear, take its toll. I'll be ready.

Cheers...