Instant SF

For over four years I’ve been attending monthly meetings of the Octavia Books Science Fiction Club. I was there at the first meeting in the summer of 2001 and I’ve never missed a meeting since.

Until today, for our first meeting post-Katrina. And even so, I was kind of halfway there. I had a virtual presence via instant messaging.

I’ve never done the instant thing before — didn’t see much need for it. But this seemed like an appropriate application of the technology.

And it worked pretty well. I was chatting back and forth with my friend Scott, the other old-timer of the group, and he relayed the jist of what was going on and what people had to say about the book we’d read (The Boat of a Million Years by Poul Anderson).

Of course there were some glitches. The client I installed on my Crackberry yesterday wasn’t working today. I think their server is down.

Luckily I was able to use Jaylene’s Sidekick II. She has Yahoo Messenger installed. So I was able to sit in her apartment kitchen here in Indianapolis in my underwear drinking instant coffee and participating in a conversation a thousand miles away.

And that felt good.