Victor Kane
Victor is an IT guy, who's originally from the UK (grew up in the US), and who's been living here in BA for almost 30 years. Over the past year or so, he's been getting into the Drupal development and consulting world, and he's lucky enough to be attending DrupalCon Barcelona 2007 next week. When I told Victor that I was in town, he invited me over to his apartment for dinner — so tonight, we met for the first time, and had a nice geeky old shmooze.
With Victor's permission, I also brought Chris and Oly along for the evening — what with both of them also being web geeks, and with all of us having just gotten together in this city, it seemed like the logical choice. The three of us set off together from The Clan, managed to navigate our way through several stops of BA's subte (subway) network, and turned up at Victor's door at about quarter to nine, armed with a bottle of Malbec red each.
It was a great evening, filled with ordered-in gourmet empanadas, and with both Victor's and our bottles of red wine combined. We met Mrs. Victor briefly — but she went to bed quite early, so we didn't see that much of her. Victor's in his 60s, and his wife's around the same age: they have a few children, but they're all grown up and living elsewhere. Victor is also Jewish, but not practicing at all (the fact that tomorrow night is Erev Rosh Hashanah was news to him). They live in quite a nice neighbourhood — virtually in the ultra-Jewish area of once — and the apartment wasn't too hard to find (Victor was nice enough to e-mail me a map).
This being our first (offline) meeting, Victor and I had plenty to talk about. We tried to keep the conversation reasonably non-Drupal-geek friendly — and even non-geek friendly — in order to include Chris and Oly; but it was a challenge! From time to time, the talk between the two of us inevitably started venturing into the realm of "modules", "nodes", "views", "hooks", "menu APIs", "theme overrides", and countless other topics, that are an utterly meaningless cacophony of jargon to normal people (i.e. people unlike Victor and myself :P). But Chris and Oly still managed to stay abreast of what was going on. Oly, in particular, was quite keen to pick up the lingo, and to learn more about Drupal, since he's trying to get into paid Drupal theme design work himself, as part of his freelance efforts down here in Argentina.
We wound things up at about 2:30am, when we finally realised that we'd been geekifying for half the night; and that we were thoroughly stuffed on empanadas, as well as hammered from all that wine. So we said goodbye to Victor, thanked him for his hospitality, and jumped in a taxi back to the hostel. Nice to see a local, as well as a friend and a member of the global Drupal community, for my first night here in BA!