I was doing some housecleaning last night and realized that I had a shelf full of 5-1/4 inch diskettes, but I haven’t had a computer in the house that could read them for about a year. So I tossed them out (I couldn’t think of any way to recycle them).

Out, 1981 taxes!

Out, PC-File!

Out, Word Perfect!

Out, TapCIS!

But I couldn’t bring myself to discard absolutely everything — when we ordered our original IBM PC in 1981 (we got such an early enough machine that it only had 64KB on the motherboard and one-sided diskette drives), we bought three pieces of software to go with it. MS-DOS 1.0, Microsoft Adventure, and VisiCalc. The first two programs are long gone, but I found the VisiCalc diskettes last night and decided to hang on to them for no good reason — after all, I have nothing which can read them! But maybe they’ll be collectables someday.

Offline till Tuesday

I get my Net connectivity through work — my home system is behind the firewall, right on the building LAN. It’s very convenient. But this weekend, Almaden is having its twice-yearly site powerdown and major maintenance — and so my connectivity will vanish when they flip the big switch.

I expect to cope just fine, and hope my silence doesn’t distress any of you.

Have a great weekend, and Shabbat Shalom!

If the US were a parliamentary democracy, Dubya would be facing a vote of no confidence now, thanks to Senator Jeffords. Of course, I haven’t had any confidence in Dubya since the first time I heard he was running for President!

After a fun and exciting two-and-a-half hours in the dentist’s chair this afternoon, I drove to the
Silicon Valley World Internet Center in Palo Alto to see what their Thursday Pubs were like. I’ll be speaking there next Thursday on Internet privacy (my title: “Privacy isn’t just the law, it’s a good idea!”) and I wanted to get an idea of the way the audience interacted with the speaker. I learned one important lesson from my trip — I need to be brief. People are there to network and partake of the refreshments; the speaker is there to provide a focus, but not to take too much time away from the real reason people come. That information alone made the trip worthwhile — and the beer wasn’t half bad, either.