It was a good weekend. On Saturday, I visited Lorna in hospital, then headed off to spend a few hours shopping in Oxford. As I was leaving the hospital, I checked my cell-phone, and saw that I’d missed a call from a UK number. I called back, and found that it was from Jeff Lower. Jeff and I had both attended Essex University in the early 1970s, and had subsequently worked together at a small software startup. We drifted apart after I moved to the States in 1981, and we hadn’t seen each other since about 1985. We recently re-established contact through LinkedIn.
Jeff lives near Newbury, about half an hour south of Oxford, and I drove down to visit for a few hours. It was delightful: Jeff has an idyllic house in the country, and we talked had lunch, listened to music, talked some more… After 22 years I really didn’t think that either of us had changed very much.
About four o’clock I returned to the hospital, and soon afterwards Alec and Adriana arrived. After visiting with Lorna for a while, the three of us took a bus into Oxford and went to Brown’s for dinner. It was, of course, a geek affair: Alec whipped out his Nokia 800 tablet in order to demonstrate the folding BlueTooth keyboard that he uses. I had ordered a Nokia 770 from W00t while I was in Dublin (just $130!), and Alec knew that it was waiting for me in Seattle. Over dinner (and later, waiting for the bus), we had a fine debate about the relevance of classical economic theories to information economies, governed as they are by network effects and the natural monopolies that flow from software platforms and wired infrastructure. It was good to see how complete Alec’s recovery has been – it was exactly a year since his accident in France – and it was great to finally meet Adriana. I’m looking forward to our next dinner.
On Sunday I flew back on a British Airways 747 that has been refitted with the very latest in-flight entertainment system, complete with video-on-demand for all. Once the cabin service director had rebooted the system(!), it was quite impressive. I watched two films: Jim Carrey in The Number 23, and the very funny Hot Fuzz.
One other thought: I spent a little while standing by the aft door as we were crossing Greenland, and I was startled to see so much bare rock, and so many meltwater lakes. The last time I’d crossed this area in summer (about ten years ago), it was pretty much solid ice from coast to coast. Not now.