in the name of Rudy

Dropped off family at airport at 5:30am this morning, who get out on an earlier flight. Hunched in my car outside of a Starbucks that doesn’t open until 7:00am, not wanting to pay $16 a day at the hotel for WiFi. This is decaffinated blogging. You’ve been warned.

I’m on the tail end of an invite-only conference, and wouldn’t you know it – what the name of Rudy Carrasco can stir up. So here I am, participating in a conference where the average age of attendees is over 60, deeply resourced people, generous, strategic, and humble.

Most of the invited speakers were comparatively younger, and I’m in a seminar about new networks, how our generation is building relationships. A question gets raised about how to build and/or maintain relationships using the Internet, to which the panelists balked by using it as a content delivery channel, rather than a means of relating by conversations and dialogue. One panelist said she’s “not like Rudy Carrasco,” who blogs and does all this networking on the Internet. So I elbow the person next to me, commenting that I know Rudy, and she lights up about how she does too! And we recognized that it was a divine appointment for us to sit next to each other; we met up later, had a dynamite conversation about what’s going on with urban leadership! Having a fairly broad exposure to all sorts of programs and models of leadership development, there’s a lot about theirs that I like a lot. I text Rudy about our breakfast, he text’d back a hello, and something about him being at a hotel lobby, apparently in Hawaii. Rudy turned me on to Spam Karma 2 – which stopped 72 comment spams yesterday dead in their track.

And, yesterday, I set aside the late lunch hour to meet up with Gid. A rendezvous for our families. He was driving towards me from Austin, I was driving towards him from San Antonio. This is the first time I recall ever having setup a meeting, without a pre-designated location. So 21st century. We coordinated entirely by cell phone! We wound up dining at the roadside classic: Cracker Barrel. Chicken Fried Chicken was my pick. Gid went with some grandpa breakfast thing, just because you can eat breakfast anytime there.