wilner.I met this cat on a plane, going from Swarthmore to San Francisco in April, and I'm wearing my wristguards and gloves and I go to the bathroom and this guy later comes up to my seat and says, "hey you're justin hall aren't you"
turns out he'd read about Doug Block in the New York Times and visited my website and remembered what I looked like. I said yeah and moved closer to his seat and we struck up some conversation. Turns out we were both headed west to look for jobs. We were both 23. We were both tech professionals with some culture hunger.
We both talked fast -
He knew about stuff I didn't - solaris, IT professionalism, porno webmaster realaudio chats, the hungry programmers. I had a big website and a lot of friends in San Francisco already.So when he arrived and moved into the Marina, I thought, this guy needs some good computer culture saturation. I invited him over to Steuer's a few times, invited him to a party at Maz, and he came!
that was the astonishing thing about him - he was willing to go to these things. So it all worked out! We became friends.
Take for example the first invitation -
I asked him if a Buffalo Daughter concert the next day interested him. And he said sure! even though he had a good job with lots of responsibility he was free to go to a concert at the last minute (because he follows the grand royal records catalog he said).
So at the concert I joked about him chaperoning Amy and Eve and Ellen and I to RenFaire. And he followed up on it!
The guy was nuts. He chaperoned us to RenFaire, barely knowing us, in his Ferrari-dealership polished nice red german car, driving stickshift impatiently, wearing nikes with a yellow polo shirt and carrying a cellphone. so he wasn't exactly in costume or inebriated, but he tolerated us and
ended up dating Ellen!
and that's a severe coinkidink since Ellen introduced me to Amy.
Wilner has a deluxe pager and a cell phone. He loves ribs.
He helped me install a satellite dish at home.
justin's links by justin hall: contact