(no subject)

Today I am feeling like I wished I lived in New York, for no particularly reasonable reason.  It's mostly random.

I just spent some time looking at the few posts I made on hashkafah.com way back in January 2005. I hung out there for about a month before deciding that I was getting too worked up and pissed off, at which point I blocked the URL in my hosts file so I wouldn't go back.

My posts there were mostly about premarital sex (I found the opinion by R' Yaakov Emden before it became more widespread knowledge and posted it in response to someone's request for anything of that nature) and chastising this woman who seemed to be a teacher in an Orthodox school in England trying to seek help for a girl who was being sexually abused by her father - except that the woman insisted that being open about the abuse or doing things that might make the father's horrible actions public or possibly lead to his or the girl's removal from the home were off-limits. A real doozie.

It's weird seeing how my thought patterns went just four years ago. (I remember that time - I was really, really stressed out.) I feel like I've changed a lot in the interim, and I'm not sure how or when.

and no, hotmail, you can't blame *this* on the Bossa Nova. (see music)

Dear Microsoft:

You fail. FAIL.  And not just for the abomination that was Windows Millennium.  And Vista. And...well, anyway, you fail because many years ago I had a hotmail account that I used to sign up for various web-things, like Friendster and some bulletin boards.  I never used hotmail much, cause it was a pain, and you used to inactivate it and delete all my mail if I didn't log in for a month, but that's not the problem.  The problem is that I just tried to recover passwords to some of those old bulletin boards, so I needed to log in to hotmail.  I tried to, but apparently not only did you inactivate the account, you totally deleted it.  You deleted it and nuked it from orbit so completely that I was just able (once I realized what was going on) to re-open a hotmail account with that very same address.  And then recover all of my passwords from those old bulletin boards.  And that was okay, because I happen to be the same person that had that hotmail account originally.  The key word here is "happen to."  Can you say security issue? I can.  And I'm glad I never used anything besides gmail or my JHU account for anything substantial.  What if it were something like my amazon.com account, or my credit card account, rather than just bulletin boards?  Even LJ and AOL (where arguably, it's not a huge deal or a security flaw if someone eventually re-uses a name) are much more conservative about retiring/recycling user names...

a lot changes in ten years

Reading

1998: Awake My Glory by Rabbi Avigdor Miller.  I was excited to happen upon it in my school's library.  It seemed to offer some manner of logic and discussion of belief. I believe I put it down once he began denouncing public libraries, though. That's crazy talk.

2008: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan. Appropriately, I got this from the public library in the People's Republic of Berkeley.

They're kind of oddly parallel to each other, in the vastly differing worlds from whence they each came.

Actually, I just did some quick math, and I think I read Awake My Glory in 1997.  Oops. Whatever.