So Wyatt and I are in Portland. Came over on Friday morning after setting up a meeting with the new Pronetos developers, Opensourcery.

Got to PDX on Friday morning, and met with the devs for a couple hours and got some milestones and what not sketched out for Pronetos through the end of the year.

After that, it was time to return to my urban historian roots. That meant hitting the city and seeing what is up in Portland.

We stayed in a residential neighborhood called Lombard in northwest Portland. We walked two blocks out of the neighborhood, and grabbed the bus. The bus dropped us off at the MAX station which ran directly to downtown, and once downtown, MAX took us to the streetcar system, which then dropped us off curbside to our destination. What an incredible system! Why does anyone here use a car? It cost us $1.70 to get from NW Portland to the Pearl District.

Our first stop was the Bridgeport Brewery for a little lunch. Before we got there however, we noted a curious oddity. In the middle of all this residential growth is an urban park that obviously was a vacant lot ala “The Hole.” Instead of throwing a building up in this crowded urban center, however, City leaders installed native grasses, stepped terraces, a large metal sculpture and a water feature.

So, since nature has already begun to reclaim “The Hole” at Eighth and Main, and the second development proposal has now failed, maybe we just let nature run its course.

Next door to the brewery, lo and behold is “The Wyatt Condominiums.” Obvious photo below: Wyatt standing next to the Wyatt. Let me say quickly too that there are probably only slightly fewer cranes here than in Dubai. Developers are rebuilding EVERYTHING here, and they aren’t the only ones. More on that later.

Now you cannot come to PDX without going to Powell’s Books, which takes up an entire city block. It’s not just a building, it is a complex - several floors spread among different buildings, all color coded by book classification - amazing. We dawdled for a couple hours. I bought a map of Somalia in the event that we get to go to Mogadishu some day (mind you 27,000 people fled the capitol city in the last month), and Wyatt grabbed some obscure book on religious philosophy.

We grabbed lunch at Rocco’s Pizza and people watched before making our way to the Rogue Brewery - an essential stop if you are going to Portland. Now here is where things get really interesting.

So we have Pronetos - MySpace for scholars - and I’ve not used social networking tools too much, so a while back I set up a profile on MySpace to learn how that thing worked. Not too long after that, I start getting “friend requests.” One of these friends turned out to be a gal from Alaska. Well I used to live in Alaska, so I was curious.

I started writing back to Amy from Alaska - she is an artist and a good one at that. Also a pretty good fisherman - better than Wyatt - that is for sure. Anyway, Amy is the only “MySpace Friend” that I ever pay attention to anymore and this weekend it turned out she was taking vacation in Portland. So TA-DA here is the three of us at the Rogue Brewery:

This is really an amazing story if you think about it. Amy told me that she was sitting around one night, and just typed in a random zip code into MySpace - Boise’s - and a few profiles, including mine, turn up. It is an amazing world when the power of the Internet and Web can connect people so quickly. And after our presentation at TechLaunch where the judges seemed kind of mystified by the whole process and reach of social networking this is an incredible business story as well.

We hung there for a while and then went to the burbs in east Portland. At the Old Chicago in Gresham, I was forced to watch Wyatt sing Neil Diamond’s “I am, I said.” Really, I have the proof:

The two of us did some early morning shopping in downtown PDX before heading to Salem where we got some work done. Speaking of work Boise city officials, The City of Portland was installing MORE rail lines in downtown. So while our folks over at the City/ITD/ACHD/Valley Ride can’t seem to figure out how to get even a bus system going, PDX has seen billions upon billions of dollars of development go up around their mass transit system, and every single one of these systems from busses to MAX to the streetcars are absolutely PACKED. So get with it.

So that covers the trip to PDX - EXCEPT for my dancing with Gypsies in an alley outside of a bar in the Pearl District . . . .