Sniffling briefly in Cambridge

Since my last post I have flown from Budapest to New York, hauled my luggage through the subways and streets of Manhattan, taken a bus from Manhattan to Boston where my luggage felt more at home riding the Boston subway, and arrived at home.  During the last day, including the busride, my nose and throat started itching, so apparently somewhere along my travels I picked up a cold virus (I have my suspicions, but will not name names ;).  Which would not be so bad except I am back on a plane tomorrow afternoon bound for LA, from which I have a 6 hour drive to Monterey on Tuesday.  This is a little sooner than I had planned, but it turns out the last training session for US Open volunteers is Tuesday evening...
   While in Manhattan I visited with 2 MIT alumni--JR Randall (above) who kindly made his futon available, and David Chan, who treated me to lunch downtown.  David was at the wedding in St. Louis but we really didn't have time to catch up there.  JR was in the Sloan fellowship leadership and David is a past president of MIT GCF, who came from Oxford and tried to imbue the fellowship with a certain amount of erudite couth.
  On Tuesday morning in LA I will have breakfast with someone I have not seen in almost 30 years, from my days in high school ministry at Carmel Presbyterian.  We reconnected through Facebook—in my opinion the most valuable thing these social networking sites do is allow us to find those our mobile society separates us from—and I'm really looking forward to it.  And since I'd like to generate some conversations on this site—do you see social networking sites as a positive or a negative?  Do they keep relationships going that our circumstances would otherwise prevent?  Or do they keep us from actual face-to-face conversations?