In 1988, I had a summer job working on the VAX at the Brandeis campus, running backup tapes, changing the green-bar paper in the printer, putting print-outs in the alphabetical cubbyholes for various science professors and grad students. And this meant I got access to the rationed computers themselves, which allowed me to send e-mails to my father, using some ridiculous BITNET address involving a lot of percent signs (though, of course, I quickly programmed a macro to get around it). I try not to think how many millions of dollars of Time-Warner stock I'd have if I had the foresight to go to work for AOL's predecessor instead of going to law school. Anyway, I'm sure this already makes me sound like an old fogey to a sizable portion of today's bloggers, and just imagine how much the next generation is going to take connectivity for granted.

I enjoy analogous accounts of technology introduction. Here's one: from the Atlantic Monthly, an 1880 description of that newfangled device, the telephone, by none other than early adopter Mark Twain. And this post is as good an excuse as any to mention one of my favorite non-fiction books, The Victorian Internet, a tale of the introduction of the telegraph, with entertainingly similar societal reactions to the modern day.

The lovely aggregator Katie Newmark is on a roll, with posts about the historical dispute over the Orson Welles version of "War of the Worlds and a nifty catch of a Alex Tabarrok WSJ discussion on rental-car pricing. Katie's popular mom links to me, too. I was going to say her dad, the second-most famous Craig Newmark, did, too, but the cite turns out to be to Walter's discussion of the Ford Pinto rather than mine, so I still have as many Franks linking me as Newmarks.

Update: The Newmark family noses ahead thanks to a gratuitous link. And it's only slightly eerie that my mother is also a schoolteacher and my father is a former professor who looked like Craig when he was that age. But my mother doesn't blog. Yet.

Speaking of gritty science-fiction, Virginia Postrel recommends the new Battlestar Galactica, which looks halfway decent according to the LA Times story linked above. I still think it won't be the same without the metallic scanning-LED-eyed/speech-synthesized Cylons of my childhood and the Universal Studios tour. The question is whether I devote several hours of my TiVo to the first-season marathon Wednesday.

Postrel also links to the charity Any Soldier, which sounded good to me at first glance, but now feels like a bad idea, given that it's designed to get around Pentagon restrictions put in place for safety reasons.

And are you a neo-con? There were a lot of places where I wanted to check two answers, but the test won't let you.

Pearl Gluck's Divan is on the Sundance Channel Thursday morning at 10:35 Eastern; it's a pleasant, worthwhile, funny documentary by a friend that I helped finance and won't get a dime from except for the tax write-off I'll take this year. No regrets.

Phonespelling.com makes the game I'd play every move easier.