We had a great time, but where’s the evidence?

What a nice Sunday we had with Ethan and Amy. We started with a 2 p.m. lunch and they headed home at 9:30. It was great to hear about Ethan’s non-representational adventures in MFA-land and how he found the rockin’ Amy and about the time they lived in an art project on an island in the Venice Lagoon during one Biennale. And it was fun sharing our own stories about cooking, our travels in Tuscany, riding the Great Dot.com Implosion through hell and into a new paradise, dogfighting at AirCombat and becoming a painter/hermit. It was even pretty painless to recall our days together at Freedom.

It was also cool to sit at the computer and bounce around the web talking about things, listening to new R.E.M., looking at work and flying video and pictures of friends and family. (Man, good thing I picked up the Mini — it would not have been a fun experience to keep waiting while the G4 snorted and chugged along!)

Michelle will be glad to hear Ethan’s comment on spiseattle: Smart. Yeah, baby. Well, we knew that, but it is great to hear that comment from Ethan, who really knows more about online communities than just about anyone. He’s been managing a successful one at his murmurs.com web site since 1996, plus he’s a walking Ethan-o-pedia of What’s Going On Now. His current gig puts him in a good position to tell the smart from the not-so-much.

And aren’t all good parties sprinkled with philosophy? We talked about being old and young, about trusting your instincts, gutting out bad jobs and snapping up good ones, universal timing, knowing when to fold, and how to heal up when you get badly burned. Best advice of the night came from Ethan: Turn down your sampling rate and use a good smoothing algorithm on the Great Graph of Ups and Downs. But I’ll let him blog about that (since he called it first.)

The downside? Because of an ongoing problem with card seating, we lost all the pix of the lunch itself! and have only a few of us hanging out at the computer afterparty. Crap! Something must be done! I’ll let you know what that is when I figure it out. In the meantime, here are a couple of nice pictures.

Thanks Ethan and Amy … come back soon!