I am very much looking forward to the day my children or my grandchildren ask me how I could possibly have grown up without the Internet. I was a part of the last generation that grew up without the online world we take for granted today (we got the Internet in our house in Grade 10).

I also hope they ask me what it was like to have less than 500 TV channels. I will tell them that having only one thing on TV to watch really united everyone in a way that will not happen again. Our lack of selection was no hardship when you had people as genuinely funny and warm as Johnny Carson on the air; it was a pleasure. That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.

RIP 1925-2005

As per usual, Slashdot pointed me to a great essay called What You'll Wish You'd Known, which is summarized on the site as follows:

Eminent computer scientist, author, painter, and dot-com millionaire, Paul Graham has written down the things he wishes somebody had told him when he was in high school in What You'll Wish You'd Known, suggesting, among other things, that students treat school like a day job, working on interesting projects to avoid what he has found to be the most common regret among adults of their high school days: wasting time.

I loved this essay and would unabashedly read it word for word to students if I was ever asked to speak at a high school. It reminded me so much of another excellent essay about high school I read a few years ago that really stuck in my mind, so I went in search of it, and 'lo and behold, it was written by the same author!

Paul Graham, who's known for his writings on Lisp and other Lisp-like languages as well as his essays on combatting spam has taken a bit of a detour from his usual topics. His latest essay is one that's a little more personal and that we can all relate to: Why Nerds Are Unpopular . It's a lengthy but engaging writeup of that chamber of horrors we call high school and why being smarter than the average bear is more of a liability than an asset during that stage in life. It's food for thought for those of us who've already been there, done that and been stuffed into lockers by the football team and it should give some hope to those who are going through it right now.

You might think the article doesn't apply to me since the resumé version of my high school experience reads

• Captain of the football team
• Dated Captain of cheerleading squad
• etc.

As he points out in the essay, we've become so productive as a society that we now have about 10 years in our lives where there is nothing for us to do, so they put us in school to keep us occupied. The problem is that school is less about teaching than it is about keeping the students in one place for eight hours a day. Rather than devoting our resources to truly educating our children and tailoring programs to help them as individuals, as usual we spend more on keeping people alive than helping them live.