I also had access to my grandparents collection of National Geographics going back to the 1920's.. I could get lost for hours reading those on a rainy day. Then there was my ham radio station, mostly home built while I was in high school. I lived in the country and had my own .22 rifle from the time I was 10 and could go outside and do some "plinking" even though there weren't other kids to play with. I didn't need video/electronic games. I know I'm old, so excuse me for thinking that video games are way over-rated.

You insensitive clod.

We played Monopoly, Parcheesi, Canasta, Rook and the like, but only when it wasn't nice outside.

We have POTS service in our house and phones that don't need power other than the CO loop current.

Our neighborhood was hit in March 2006 by an F2 tornado. Our house survived rather well, but the infrastructure didn't.... other than the phone lines which are buried clear back to the CO. I was on the phone in the basement while the storm was passing overhead, checking on our kids who live nearby, but out of the direct path of the two tornadoes that hit our community that day. We had no electricity for a week and no cable for 10 days. They were mostly above ground.

My wife and I both have cell phones, but they did not work because the cell tower nearest us went down, too.

We survived fairly comfortably with a 5.5 KW generator and gas heat. We had access to the Internet via a dialup connection, which we don't have now.

I'm a firm POTS believer.

All the field technicians have company supplied phones that have GPS tracking enabled. Their supervisor can track them via a map display and their movements are logged and retained. They also are dispatched via those phones and enter their time and material accounting per job that way. It's very efficient. Do they like it? No, not very much, but it's part of the deal if you work as a field technician for this company with over 30,000 employees world-wide. If you don't like it, don't work in this well-paid industry. All of the competitors are doing the same thing.

I had my annual physical with my family doctor yesterday. He told me that he no longer does, nor does he recommend, prostate cancer screening based on recent studies. Most of the prostate cancers detected are not the ones that will kill you, but it's not possible to test for that without an invasive biopsy that is very uncomfortable. If you jump right into treating the cancer, that is also very uncomfortable and potentially debilitating.

I worked for T.I. when they were making LED watches in the Dallas plant. Security asked me to design a random search generator hooked to a switch on a turnstile leaving the assembly area. They could select the search frequency by means of a DIP switch.

We're still using XP and Office 2003. I've heard rumblings from IT that we're going to go to Win7 via remote upgrade, but haven't seen anything happening out in the branch offices where I work. XP isn't suddenly going to stop working. It's just the end of updates/MS support.

Some are glass plate Daguerreotypes. Somehow, I am not too confident that my digital pictures will be legible 150 years from now, unless I make a good quality print on archival paper. Digital files are too easily corrupted and made totally useless. Media formats will change. 8" floppies anyone?

I occasionally have to interface with Square-D SyMax PLCs from the early 80s. We still have equipment at customer sites that's using it. The software we have to do the programming uses software timing loops so I have to use a 386 or early 486 laptop to run it. I have this very old 386 laptop with an 80 Meg hard drive that still hangs on and boots. I've warned my boss that someday it won't boot and we'll be done.

In contrast to typical land-line phones, cell phones have no "side-tone". Side-tone is the portion of the audio signal from the microphone routed to the receiver (earpiece). By having side-tone we have feedback relating to how loud we're talking and the signal going to the other end. Without the side-tone, there is a natural tendency to talk louder. I don't know why cell phone designers have not incorporated side-tone. The amount of power it would consume is very small.

Minority Report references in 3..2..1

I know because I was without power for a full week when we had a tornado in my area in 2006. my POTS phone worked without a hitch. A buried pair of copper wires works when cell towers come down. Yes, I have a couple of phones that don't require power other than the 48 volts at the CO. This is the reason that I decline the VOIP offerings of my local cable provider. Cable was off for 10 days during that incident.

I was 51 years old at the time.

It was my first date with the woman who is now my wife. We went to it for several years when we were involved with the organization that sponsors it. This year we're staying home by the fireplace watching some TV and just generally goofing off. Not a bad way to see the new year in.