I used a Heathkit dumb terminal and some even-then-obsolete 300 baud acoustic coupler modem to dial up the local grocery store. Dad was always terrible with passwords, both then and now. I got into their VMS system, and now I was in, I had the run of the place, I ruled the world. I changed the price of ground beef. The police never knocked on my door. It's amazing how far all of this has come since the BBS days. Today's kids just have NO idea what it used to be like, with their broadband and their interwebs and their tweeter and their googol. Now get off my lawn.

I find lorem ipsum distracting, because I can't help trying to read it, whereas I would tend to ignore some similarly obvious boilerplate gibberish in English.

It's interesting recommending experiences instead of things. I can see some of the wisdom of that, as I have a small collection of cherished memories of random, unique, highly memorable stuff I did. It's a very small but dear collection. In practice, traveling to go do stuff is the one thing I have all but never actually done. Even now, thinking about how nice it might be to collect some new memories, I just can't justify pissing away that much money on something so ephemeral. Every time I price out a trip somewhere, I run away screaming. Maybe memories really are worth buying, but if so, I still can't afford them.

I'm struck by the idea that the new and improved digital encyclopedias are better than the dead tree versions, because they preserve everything forever, instead of slowly losing information through a process of attrition. Digital information is constantly being lost through a process of attrition. Ever try to load that program you wrote for your home computer back in 1985? Ever try to load that brilliant paper you wrote in college, that you saved on a 360K floppy disk, as a file for some long-forgotten word processor that never used one of the more popular formats? Good luck with any of that. If you had printed any of those things out on paper, however, there's a good chance you'd still have access to them today. I'm a big fan of books, and I think it will be a severe tragedy for humankind if we eventually stop printing them. Fake digital books are fine for computer- and other technology-related crap that will be laughably obsolete in a few years anyway, but for anything that adds any real lasting value to the body of human expression and knowledge, dead tree is the one and only way to go. Temporary, short-lived copies of dead tree books are just fine as a convenience, but please print them and stick them in a library somewhere too.