It was one of those random moments .. as I stood there waiting to talk with the orange-aproned Plumbing Guy at the 24 hour Home Depot at Victoria Park and Ellesmere, up walked John MacDonald (co-author of Mastering Algorithims in Perl), whom I'd just seen the previous Thursday night at Steve MacNabb's Blinkenlites presentation at the Toronto Perl Mongers monthly meeting. He'd finished doing his plumbing but the snaky bits of pipe going from the wall to the sink were old and not watertight, so he had to get replacements. The water had been off all day and his family was getting impatient. I knew all about that.

Fortunately I wasn't too confused or out of context to be able to say hello, rather then sit there like a lump and say, "Hmm, where do I know that guy from?" Then I saw John again the following Wednesday at the Hamilton Linux Users Group meeting which he wrote up for Groklaw (see .sig). A terrific meeting with a panel consisting of Peter Salus (Unix historian), Robert Young (formerly of Red Hat, now owner of the Hamilton Tiger Cats) and Ren Bucholz of the EFF.

Update EdwardG has pointed out that I've mis-spelled 'author', so I've corrected it. I thought this was one of those UK spellings we still use in Canada, but I guess I'm mistaken.