Finally Met Yuga

I’m very glad to have made Abe Olandre‘s acquaintance last Friday, finally, at a Nokia event. We were amongst the group who came very early, so I went up to him and explained who I was, and he was very accomodating.

He said he had heard of my sites from his kumpare Alwell whose managed web hosting service I used to use, probably when they were talking shop. I had to leave Mobilehive when the sites were exceeding my monthly allocations almost within the 1st week, which I’m sure I talked about at length on this blog.

Anyway, Abe has always been on my radar, but we’ve never had the chance to meet, mostly because I haven’t ever attended any sort of blog meetup or conference since I started. When we started talking, I felt as if I was talking to an old friend, and for good reason. He is the only person I have met who is in exactly the same business as I am, doing almost the same methods as I do as well. We are both publishers and we each own several blogs, each of which pursue their own paths. He came in from the web hosting side of things, never expecting to write, while I came from the writing and publishing world so to speak.

We both code, and funny enough we went through several similar stages in the dogged pursuit of our businesses. He recounted a time when he had to literally take a job just to get a credit card, which reminds me of a time when a good friend and I stole borrowed a friend’s motorcycle to buy a new hard disk for our busted computer because we didn’t have enough money for jeep fare and we had to get our website up. We also had our adventures with our own credit card, some bordering on the criminal, all hilarious now as I look back.

What strikes me most is his humble demeanor, a giveaway to his simple beginnings and no nonsense way of discussing and explaining things. He was very open to me and I hope I was just as accomodating, considering he shared a few insights I feel I should discuss with him further, given his trust in me in sharing them.

I hope to be able to speak with him at length again, although I doubt it considering we’re both fairly busy. What I mean with this is that I don’t think he’s the type who’d waste time shooting the breeze and neither am I. Besides, we are essentially competitors, and so there isn’t really much business for us to discuss unless something mutually beneficient comes up, so we’d have to wait for that.

At any rate, he is scrappy, down to earth, an intelligent and interesting conversation and from what he told me, quite disciplined as well. And for the first time in quite awhile I didn’t sense that usual bloated, bruised or otherwise overly sensitive ego I normally encounter whenever I meet people in my field.

No wonder his sites rake it in.

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