The connections

I keep pointing this out, because it's so damned amazing: most of my friends I know because of modern communications.

I believe in my friends' willpower and intense dedication to do right, and to come together, sometimes to do great things, and sometimes just to have great times. All because they moved some pixels around on a screen, hit SEND, and caused some pixels to move around on other person's screens.

I converse with extremely smart people on a fairly regular basis, with no other passcode or birthright than that I send them an email and they write back. How amazing. I've been doing this for a quarter of a century.

See now the brief lecture of Jim Gilliam, who had the same epiphany but on a MUCH more significant level. While I may owe my social life to the Internet, Jim owes his physical life to it.