meme: online friends

Ganked from scarletk8:

If there is at least one person in your life who you consider a close friend, and who you would not have met without being part of an online community, post this sentence in your journal.

Hm, let me count them:

ohdhalia (met on IRC about 1993 or so)
shechemist (met on NMSU server in early '90s... not sure if we still qualify as "close friends" but we still talk.)
Lej (met on IRC EFNet #perl, don't talk much these days but we were close for a while.)

There is a much longer list of people I've met online whom I still chat with occasionally, but our lives don't cross paths often enough for us to be close friends these days. (My usual estimation is: for every 1000 people I interact with online, about 10 will become acquaintances, and about 1 will become a close friend.)