portable friends

Yesterday, I was talking to Alex about all kinds of things that he knows a lot about. I felt like a child asking him about the basics of life as I quizzed him about programming, viruses, servers, and many other things. I have all these questions, and he was a very good person to turn to for answers. He knows my level of “geek”, so he was able to sufficiently dumb down his answers so that I would understand. It was lovely. I once wrote a facebook note about experts, and I thought about it yesterday. Not that you have to be an acclaimed “expert” to be fascinating, but just the very fact of knowing something, and being passionate about it, and being willing to share, is awesome. The things my friends know fascinate me. Sometimes I think that there is nothing comparable I could tell them, although that’s probably not true. I remember listening as Jenya described futures to me, and why what Enron did was really really bad. It was fascinating. But, I digress…

the point of this is that Alex and I touched on the concept of data portability. The whole idea that you can take something and make it easily transferable and usable with another program, service, cms, whatever. It started out with me talking about e-mail, but it obviously goes well beyond that. Anyways, later that night I got to thinking about portable friends. I like the fact that there are certain people in my life who don’t normally intersect. I don’t have one tight group of friends, but instead there are different guys and girls with different things going on. I’ve realized that one thing that most of them have in common is their ‘portability.’ I like that I can bring a friend to a group of people he or she doesn’t normally see, and they will still get along well, and find stuff to talk about, and not be all awkward. It’s great to have portable friends.