The wonder of the internet - Part 1

Fair warning, this is a long post that sets out how the Internet made my life so much richer than it would have been otherwise.

The photograph above is one that surfaced on my dear friend Marianne's blog recently ( Marianne's World ).

It won't mean a great deal to anyone else but, for me, it is a clear reminder of the wonder of the internet that I came to know and love this woman.

What seems many years ago now, 15 maybe, I was a big fan of all things tech (still am, if a little more focussed) and involved with various websites and people online. My interaction was all online, there was no-one in my local area or even the UK, that I had much contact with apart from following Adam, Curry's Daily Source Code / No Agenda podcasts.

The internet is like Alice's rabbit hole and I had gone down it far enough to encounter a whole different world from the one I lived.  In time I got acquainted with various people including the late James Kendrick and Kevin Tofel of the JKOnTheRun podcast, and Josh Bancroft, a person who worked hard to promote the benefits of IT, with his TinyScreenfuls blog; a site no longer running but here is an example page via the immensely helpful Wayback Machine: tinyscreenful.com June 2010.

One day Josh mentioned a friend of his, who also worked at Intel; a lady who blogged about her Waltons-like life on a mountain (that is how the memory of it is to me and we all know how unreliable memory can be).  I had always enjoyed the Waltons, the thought of living somewhere remote enough to be away from others at the end of the day, so I took a look.

It was soon apparent that I had found somewhere I would happily return to.  The writing was informal in style and consisted of observations of the smaller yet important things in life.  Over time I interacted with the blog and the lady who wrote it, Marianne.  Time passed and I had no thoughts of meeting Marianne, our worlds were so different and I had never even been to America.

It's funny how things turn up in one's life.  I think that things turn up for everyone but it is being able to spot the opportunity while it is still grabbable, like riding a horse and brushing past some brambles and rather than avoid them, looking through the brambles and spotting treasure. I have a friend Cath, who mentioned she was hosting a course in something called the Passion Test.  I had no idea what this was but Cath said that she found it very helpful and I trusted the things she told me, so I signed up.

The course proved helpful at organising what 5 things I valued above all others and gave me a strategy to keep moving towards them.  Within 3 months I found an opportunity for organising a trip to America, ostensibly to celebrate my wife Cathy's significant birthday but I looked to what else we could do while across the pond.  After I had begun planning and had arranged to stay with my cousin, then in Utah, it was only weeks before my hairdresser announced that she was emigrating to the USA with her family.  I mentioned that we were going on holiday in the US and was invited to visit with them in the next-door state to my cousin.

With two locations sorted out for the holiday, I decided to look around to see if there was anything else we could fit in while they're.  I had a friend called Buzz that I had met on the internet through mutual friends like I had with Marianne and he always said that we should have dinner if I was ever in his area.  Well, it only looked like a couple of inches on the map to travel to get to Seattle and meet up with Buzz.  Using the same principle it was only a couple of inches for the down on the map to get to where Marianne lived in Oregon. I made contact with Buzz and agreed that we would meet up for dinner by flying over to him from Salt Lake City.  I then contacted Marianne and invited her to come to Seattle and have dinner with us while we were there.  Marianne made it very clear early on that I had no idea about the scales involved in travelling through America. a couple of inches on the map to me was a 6 or 7-hour drive for her so, Marianne being Marianne, she suggested out of the blue that we came and stayed for a week with her, which I readily agreed to.

if it was not for the internet I would never have visited Seattle for dinner and breakfast and then travel down to Oregon to stay with someone who is now, along with others of her household/extended family, a member of my chosen family.