Cigars and great conversations...
My good friend Keith is one of my oldest friends as an adult. We met 12 years ago, and to this day he is a friend, a mentor at times, a guy who has been kind enough to help me build furniture when it is too much for me to do alone (especially as he has a cordless screwdriver!), and our friendship is unconditional. I enjoy the times we have spent together alone, with his fiancee Mary Ellen (an wonderful woman too), and even with his children. Keith enjoys many of life's finer things, with the most low-key, down-to-earth attitude. One of his enjoyments is smoking cigars. And every so often I am invited, and encouraged to join him at Nat Sherman 's to lounge downstairs and catch up. Yesterday was one of those days. Interestingly, yesterday was a day I woke up knowing I would be talking with strangers. I was attending a conference put on by IBM's Predictive Perspectives , and as my inner geek loved SPSS in grad school, I was excited to see how IBM was taking this long-ti...