The Modern World
 
Yesterday evening, I was at a party with the other London based contributors to the Samizdata blog, and it was a very pleasant evening. However, some of the foreign contributors couldn't make it (although Frank McGahon did make it over from Ireland) . Scott Wickstein was in Adelaide, of course, but I was able to do something quite interesting later in the evening, which was to get out my laptop, launch Skype, and get Scott at least into the conversation. My laptop has an internal speaker and an internal microphone, so all that was necessary was to say something vaguely near the laptop and he could hear us. And of course the laptop was running off batteries and was connected to the internet by WiFi, so the laptop was not connected to anything: we were just using it to talk to Scott in Australia.
 
A couple of non-Samizdata people found this impressive. Hell, I found this impressive, but one lady felt the need to come over and participate in the conversation merely because it was an interesting technological advance, I think.
 
Update: There are some photos of the party here. You can just see the back of my head in the top photo. My mother should note that I have been a good boy and had a haircut.