Dinner with mystful

Last night, gnomi, farwing, and I had dinner with mystful at our local kosher Chinese restaurant, Taam China. (Tonight, gnomi and I are having dinner there again, this time with my former student moneypenny.) mystful was one of the students in the writing workshop we facilitated at Harvard last month, and since she was kind enough to get in touch before the workshop, we wanted to spend some time with her.

She's a fascinating person, who has accomplished a lot for someone so young. It turned out that as a high school student she had spent a year in Beijing. She speaks Mandarin Chinese, so we introduced her to the owner of the restaurant, and the two of them had an extended conversation in Mandarin. I have no idea what they talked about, but from context it was probably about her experiences in China.

We also talked about writing, of course, and why one shouldn't use too many adverbs as dialogue tags. (See gnomi's post here for a link to Tom Swifties.) But on a personal note, what got me was how much Harvard has changed since I've been there. I knew that they had wired the dorms for the Internet, but starting next year all the dorms are going wireless! < old man grumpy voice >In my day, we didn't have this "wireless" Internet in our dorms! If we wanted to check our e-mail, we had to shlep all the way to the Science Center, through the snow, uphill, both ways! And we didn't have any of these sissy front-end programs! We had to know how to use Unix or VMS!< /old man grumpy voice >.

Okay, I'm done now. :-)

News of the Future: June 22, 2056

This week, something strange is happening at The Onion. Apparently, a weird warp in space-time has sent back to us their issue from June 22, 2056.

My favorite headlines include:

• Million Robot March Attended By Exactly 1,000,000 Robots
  
  
• Leather-Clad Nomads Seize Power in Australia
  
  
• Remainder of Ross Ice Shelf Now in Smithsonian Freezer
  
  
• Democratic Middle Eastern Union Votes To Invade U.S.
  

When I Was a Boy, We Didn't Have No Stinking Internet!

...and if we wanted to communicate, we had to use tin cans and a string.

My post about last night's dinner prompted some replies regarding what people remembered about their access to the Internet and computers when in college. At my request, gnomi has posted one of my favorite one-upsmanship stories here:

People started playing one-upsmanship games about how long they'd been online, how long they'd had an e-mail address, that sort of thing. "When I got my first account, I was using a 1200-baud modem," said one. "1200 baud? Try 300 baud," said another one.

Enjoy.

(Oh, and tonight we had dinner with my former student moneypenny and her boyfriend funwithiago.)