The Holiday is Over

It was a nice Whitsun , (whoops, went ethnic there,) I mean to say Memorial Day Weekend.  Now it's a rainy day Tuesday.  I am looking out my office window at the rain swept streets and humming Simon & Garfield songs relating to weather.

I'd like to mention the Abilon program again.  It was just too much, too soon and in the words of that kind cartoonist, my brain was quickly full.  This is not to say the program was in any way defective.  On the contrary, it was too good.

It's the War and Peace of online information tools. Or, perhaps it just seemed that way at first when it pulled in so much information so quickly. 

They rebuilt the 2-bit, literally, computer used by the British to crack the German code during WW II.  It could do over 4000 computations a minute.  The 64 bit AMD processor with 1Mb of onboard cache can do many million a second.  What's in store for us tomorrow?

When I was a kid, growing up in the middle of the last century, on a small 14 mile long island on the Atlantic Coast, we had five television stations, three morning papers, three afternoon papers and four evening papers.

The radio was made of wood and played only AM.  There was one phone in the house, in the hall on the telephone table.  It was rarely used.  If someone had something to say to you, they came over, knocked on your door and told it to your face.  Or they sent the youngest of the brood over to convey the message.

We thought we were the communication capital of the world. We were, back then.  Now the world has no communication captial. 

When I sent an email from a cybercafe in a small roadside cafe in the remote hills of Morocco to my wife in Cape Cod, I knew the days of one phone in the hall were like the days of listening as the Morse code keys at the railroad station report the news of Lincoln's assassination to the world.  Gone.

This is not a case of nostalgia, but a case of wonder at it all.  A desire to dive right in and take it all in one fell swoop.  That is, until I have to raise my hand to the teacher, like the small headed boy in the cartoon and ask to go home because  my brain is full.  =30=