Connections made via Couchsurfing.com
Last year I signed up for an account on Couchsurfing.com. Mostly the people who’ve come to visit have been friends of mine from outside of the network. But sometimes someone comes through who knows me only from reading my profile. Some of the folks are unforgetably interesting, like Phil Erner, a grad student studying physics, who stopped by and explained to me exactly why dark matter is needed to explain observed anomalies in the rotation of galaxies. Some of the visitors seem sent by mysterious but caring forces, just to help me out. For instance, last month I was wrestling with the issue of how to proceed with a very large web client of mine. I asked myself, should I write their software from scratch, or should I take an existing CMS like WordPress or Joomla and customize it? Just then some fellow named Andy called up. He said he was biking across America, and he was wondering if he could crash at my place for a night. Turned out it was Andy Skelton, who is on the core team of WordPress. So he stopped by and we spent some time talking about the client and talking about how to customize WordPress. What are the chances of such a thing?