Fun Lunch

I had the great good fortune to work with Bob Metcalfe in 1999 on his book, Internet Collapses and Other Infoworld Punditry and this past Thursday we had lunch together. Honestly, people who go around inventing things like ethernet intimidate the hell out of me, but I try to act like it's no big deal. I asked Bob if I could blog about him and he said I could say that he invented packet switching and that he built the internet with his own hands over Thanksgiving in 1968. Again, I think he was just trying to make me feel like a useless punk, since the only thing I've ever done with my own hands over any Thanksgiving was stuff a turkey.

So we had this almost perfect lunch — half food/half talk/half net — because we were in his office, eating at his conference table and every few minutes we'd talk about something and then we'd have to run over to his computer on the other side of the room and show one another something online like this, and then go back and sit down to eat and then we'd talk about something like this and then we'd bounce back over to the computer and it got me thinking that we really don't have this world very seamlessly integrated and I wish we could just get it together.

There are so many places I want really robust, really fast Net access while I'm doing other stuff — like waiting for luggage at an airport, eating at every restaurant, while I'm swimming in a pool, in line at McDonald's, getting a pedicure, any place you can do laundry, on a treadmill at the gym, at my kid's school. Bob, please work on this next Thanksgiving.