The first time I met Cory Doctorow was when I was home from Crazy Go Nuts University on the Thanksgiving long weekend of 1992. I was wandering around my old high school stomping ground of Toronto’s Queen Street West neighbourhood when I decided to pop in for a visit to Bakka books to pick up a copy of this new book that a number of people had been raving about: Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Cory was the guy who behind the counter who got all excited that (a) I was buying this little-heard-of book and (b) I had heard about it on Usenet. I didn’t figure that out until well after I met him again in 1995, when he pulled out a Mac Duo laptop onto the bar of the Spadina Hotel’s saloon, an act that was then so improbably futuristic that he might as well have pulled out a raygun and jetpack.
George wouldn’t meet Cory until some time in early 2000 at Republic in Union Square, New York, where the three of us had lunch. In March of that year, Cory had brought me along as the “face” of the development team for OpenCola’s dog-and-pony sessions with the biggest VCs in Toronto; during those sessions, I had George on my cellphone feeding us advice. As a result of his help and that meeting, George became our New York-based biz dev guy.
Cory’s currently touring around promoting his latest book, Overclocked. George caught up with him when he passed through New York a couple of weeks ago, and I did the same last Thursday when he passed through Toronto. If you ever get the chance to meet up with him at one of his book signings orany of the tech events at which he speaks, do it — he’s a fun guy who’s always got something interesting to say. Failing that, you might want to catch this MP3 interview (with transcript) with cyber-hippie RU Sirius over at 10 Zen Monkeys in which he talks about piracy, copyright, his stories, Creative Commons and all his favourite topics.