Hacking My Reality

The first time the power of the net hit me was way back in 1997 when I posted my first gallery of photography, some pics of trips to Cuba, on my website. A day or so after they went up, I got an email from Japan, someone who had seen the photographs and wanted to say hi. My photographs had just gone global in an instant.

The light bulb went on, the ground shifted, hell froze over - I got it.

A few days ago I finally made good on an invite I received a couple of weeks ago from a netizen named Mike Lee. We came to each other's attention through a website called hiptop Nation where we both started posting photos from our Sidekicks way back in 2003. I soon left for the greener pastures of better voice communication and bigger phonecam pics, but we kept reading each other's blogs and soon met up again on the uber-photo site Flickr.

We had lunch near The Post and chatted about life on and off line for almost 2 hours. A main topic of conversation was our admiration for the work of John Maeda at MIT. Turns out that Mike, through his gig at AARP has spent a good deal of time in the Maeda-sphere and clearly saw my eyes light up every time he recounted some of the things he saw and did while there.

Mike, who looks innocent enough, has hacked my reality - I got an email from the good Dr.'s office yesterday and I will enter the sphere in a couple of days. Life hack, via hiptop, Flickr and the web, courtesy Mike Lee.