Have a bunch of things I should be working on, but having a rough morning for a variety of reasons (nothing big, just annoying), so I'm going to procrastinate from work by telling a *nice* story about something cool that happened because of the internet recently.

When I was growing up, I was friends with a couple of brothers who lived around the corner from me (one a year older, one two years younger). We would get together and play pretty much every day. I have lots of happy memories playing with them.

I have so many memories of hanging out with them, but one of my favorites was that they had a set of giant shelves in their (unfinished) basement, and the older brother realized that if we cleared the stuff out of the shelves, each shelf could hold small boys about our sizes...

So we spent a few days, building the shelves into "apartments" for us (and a couple other boys in the neighborhood). We also built a cool pulley system so we could move stuff (food) from "apartment" to "apartment" and do other things, like turn on/off lights, close the door, etc.

And we had a few sleepovers in those apartment shelves. The older brother also created some amazing treasure hunts for all the younger boys, including difficult to solve clues and literal buried treasures. It was a lot of fun.

When I was 11, the family moved away to Georgia, which was pretty sad. I actually stayed in letter-writing contact with the younger brother for a few years, and even got to see him once when I happened to be in Georgia a couple years later.

But, I completely lost all contact with both of them about the time I went off to college. That was... 28 years ago. I should note that the brothers have VERY common names. It's not this, but the equivalent of Joe & Bob Smith.

Every so often I'd poke around online to see if I could find either of them without much luck. The namespace was... extremely crowded, and I really didn't have much to go on to find them. I knew where *one* of them had gone to college and when, and that was basically it.

And, trust me, neither Facebook nor LinkedIn were any help at all. Just way too many people with their names.

About 5 years ago, somehow I found a corporate profile that I was pretty sure matched the older brother -- and included his email address. I excitedly typed up a "hey... are you...?" email... and... it bounced. Saying that he was no longer employed there, but with no other info.

I had thought about reaching out to the company to see if they could give me info on where he had gone, but never got around to it. A couple weeks ago, I got the nostalgia bug again, and searched again... And the only thing I found was *THE SAME CORPORATE PROFILE.*

And I though that was weird, since he'd left many years ago apparently. Then I reread the profile, and saw that it said he had left for a few years AND THEN COME BACK (also a few years ago). So I dashed off another "hey... are you...? do you remember...?" email.

And, this thread would be going nowhere if the answer was *of course it was him.* And, yes, he remembered our various adventures as kids, and reminded me about a bunch of others. And he cc'd in the younger brother, and the three of us have been reminiscing...

And it's kind of amazing how we're all distributed around the globe, and yet are able to catch up and reminisce 35 years after we last got to see each other in person. There's not much more to this story, other than to say it's been nice that we were able to reconnect.

And so at a time when everyone wants to blame the internet for all sorts of evils (many of which are legit concerns), I'd like to remember that it also has created some amazingly cool things about people being able to connect. /end.