Walking down memory lane with Keith

1999 was the year! I was only 22 and boy did I party like "It was 1999!" One boat, Forty Sri Lankans, One Sri Lankan band, Three good friends, Two crazy girls, One hot mother and unlimited liquor, December 31, 1999, Long Beach California, somewhere in the middle of the lake where you'd least expect to be hit by Y2K.

Ahh the good old days! When we working our butts off, sometimes 48hrs+ straight, on a novel project called Menus.com. Those were exciting times, when an idea can easily end up being turned into a dot com site, billboard everywhere displaying some new dot com name, which ultimately ended with the dot com crash back in 2000.

keithlane

Keith is in town and I was invited with a couple of other old friends to Hilton Colombo for lunch. I got a bit late getting there after the Python group presentation, but made it just in time to start lunch. It was nice seeing Keith, who I thought had got slightly thinner, and Manik (daughter) who looked pretty much the same except for the height and Migari (wife) who was busy attending a cookery demonstration and just popped in for a minute or two. Indika, Aruna and Bartee were the old friends I worked with then (well actually Indika I worked with again recently) and Buddhike (yes similar to my name but ends with an e) and another guy(sorry I forgot) are new to me and are still working for Paragon, Keith's company.

We talked about the good (and bad) times ... well actually it was mostly good :) How we worked very hard long hours thanks to coffee and showers, how we managed to recover from the rare screwup(s), the crazy things we did with "silly slammers", vagas!, barbecues, Migari's Margaritas... the list goes on. After a couple of hours of feeling nostalgic and seduced by a wonderful lunch followed by desert, it was time to "say good bye" again :(

Hopefully Keith will do another visit sometime next year and we can do this all over again, but differently :)

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