Pete's Log: A Quarter Century of Online Journaling
Entry #2440, (Life in General, Meta)(posted when I was 45 years old.)
Once upon a time it felt perfectly normal to drive to a friend's apartment because you kept getting a busy signal when you tried calling their landline. And I captured that time.
Twenty-five years ago today I posted my first log entry. This morning Jamie surprised me with a cake. Since our daughter likes to ask about the "olden days", I figured we could celebrate a quarter century by revisiting some stories from way back when.
The biggest lifestyle change has to have been the acquisition of a cell phone. I first got one in August of 2001 and it's wild to look back and remember a time when we weren't constantly available. Or didn't have easy access to directions to anywhere.
Like if you copied the directions to a friend's house wrong, then you might have to rely on the kindness of strangers to help you find the rest of the way there. Or when going on lengthy road trips, you had to rely on paper maps.
Taking pictures also sure has changed in that time. I bought my first digital camera just a few months before my first cell phone, and it would be a while before I'd have a device that could serve as both. In fact as recently as 2011, I felt the need to point out that pictures I'd taken had been taken on my phone. My current brain actually has a hard time coming to terms sometimes with how few pictures I have from before 2001.
Now before I kindly ask you all to get off my lawn, I will leave you with a bulleted list of other quaint reminders of the olden days:
- Remember taping shows off the tv? Apparently this was still a thing I did well into 2000.
- It's weird to think about how often I used to go to Blockbuster, although only five entries mention it by name.
- Using Wi-Fi for the first time felt incredibly cool.
- Remember messing with IRQs?
- It's entertaining to remember DeCSS being a big deal and it's nice to see the link in that entry still works.
- Remember when YouTube was new and exciting?
Join me after my next quarter century in 2048 to find out why I think Large Language Models are quaint!