I’m importing some posts from my old sowbug.org blog, which ended in 2011. Most posts were garbage, or from the good old days of the Oversharing Internet. Those will stay offline. But a few had some thought put into them, and they’re worth republishing.
Notes from scanning the rejects:
- Almost all the links to external sites are dead.
- I spent a lot of time learning and redocumenting how to use Emacs. Perhaps entirely uncoincidentially, I don’t use Emacs anymore.
- So far I have found only one interesting prediction that came true. In 2004, I observed that search was becoming a better way to deal with information than filing/organizing, so I speculated that the coming generation of operating systems wouldn’t expose concepts of files/folders to end users. I was right about that. Of course, there are apps that are inherently about files (Dropbox, for example). But for the most part, apps don’t make users worry about files.
- Inventions: I asked for child locks on technology, mostly so they wouldn’t burn themselves or stop a video while pressing the pretty buttons on the DVD player. For the most part, these are now commonplace where they’re needed. I also asked for commercials to be somehow downloadable so that people could save the ones they liked. This more or less happened through YouTube, though I don’t know how many of them are published by the content owners, and how many are copyright-infringing rips.
- Families are still under-served in technology. There are Netflix profiles and Spotify family accounts. But the idea of two people sharing an account and being able to each set their own password is still rare. Even in the most obvious case of an online joint bank account, I haven’t found a bank that allows both separate passwords and the equivalent of a single check register. My new 2023 take on the reason is that families look too much like small businesses, so companies don’t want to cannibalize their SMB/enterprise product lines with (presumably free or lower-cost) personal features that do the same thing.
- I was excited about lots of new technology: TiVo, different video/audio codecs, LEDs as a replacement for incandescents, dedicated file servers (now called NASes), burnable CDs and DVDs, being able to take your own passport photo at home, and personal transportation (Segway). Almost all of these are now gone, replaced with the cloud or streaming.
- I really enjoyed learning to play poker. I wanted to talk about it all the time.
- People commented on blogs back then, and their comments were great. Spammers were just starting to ruin everything, and real commenters didn’t politicize everything.