"You look better in person than in that photo on your blog."

I promised Dave that I would use that quote as the title of this post. It is one of the first things I said as I settled into my barstool between Dave and PDM this afternoon. I was the last to arrive after some unexpected traffic delays turned a 10-minute drive into 40+ minutes.

After almost, but not quite meeting Kat in real life back in September, I finally met one of my cyber friends in person. Dave and I have been corresponding, first on our blog comments and later via email, for about three years. At some undefinable point along the way, Dave began to seem less like an acquaintance and more like a friend. Given that we live in Atlanta, relatively close on our sprawling metro scale, and even frequent some of the same places, it seemed sort of odd that we'd never met.

So PDM and I met Dave at Zuffy's Place this evening and had a few beers. We had some "ill-gotten" (read: undeserved) gift cards for winning trivia there (mostly because our opponents did not understand math) that we'd been saving for a special occasion. This seemed like a good way to spend them. The three of us talked about all kinds of stuff - from PDM's teaching experiences, to our college years, privacy, technology, real estate, careers, to mutual blog friends and how they all tie together, and even (gasp) politics. I told Dave I thought he was a "liberal libertarian" and he seemed intrigued by that description. Time flew by and we were definitely having fun. I hope it will be less than three years before we do it again.