Nate Angellraised by wolves, accidental open-source evangelist

Something odd happened to me today. I ran into a complete stranger on the Internet.

I signed into chat, and almost immediately had the conversation below with someone I didn't know, going by the handle "toweringcoho". I was at a largish gathering and had bonjour turned on as usual, so assumed it was someone in the room—even though I didn't bother to look to see what chat connection toweringcoho was using.

A quick Google search suggested that "toweringcoho" is the name of one of a series of IM bots that randomly connect to otherwise unconnected chat users.

And that's how I met Sunil Khiatani from Hong Kong. It took a while for both of us to figure out that we were NOT talking to robots, and a bit longer to introduce ourselves. In the end, we had a worthy conversation, got to know each other a bit, and went on our ways.

I'm not sure if these IM bots are supposed to be malicious, but I liked what happened. It was like going on a kind of unintentional dérive in text only.

This slideshow brings together some select shots from my Flickr photostream.

Like most of what happens to me, I was accidentally in the right place at the right time to be interviewed by the Back Fence Babes Melissa Lion and Frayn Masters about "true colors," the theme of their then upcoming Back Fence event.

If you want to know more about me and my background, this story may help, if you believe any of it ;)

After my first 1,000 tweets on twitter, I've generated this tweetcloud:

Now that I'm working for rSmart, I expect to need to be at their HQ in Phoenix, Arizona fairly often. Being a native Coloradan, I probably don't need to belabor our general attitude toward Phoenix: This land of water- and gas-guzzling conservative golfers should not exist.

But now that I've matured (some), I'm trying to have a more open mind. Also, as I have to keep coming back to Phoenix for work, I should try to find something here to like (besides my awesome colleagues at rSmart).

People have been asking what the deal is with the images in my site header.

I've been experimenting with loading random background images from my collection using Drupal's integrated jQuery tools.

I've been thinking about trying to work on having the images feed from a flickr stream, perhaps using the Drupal flickr module, yet be automatically sized/cropped for the site header. More on that if I get to it.