Also, IIRC the microsoft wallet WAS the cybercash wallet. I didn't work on the wallet so my memory is fuzzy, but it wasn't a wholesale theft or anything, just a re-branding. We had some kind of a partnership thing going on. Cybercash was making money on the back end merchant banking side of things so having a different wallet or even a different merchant server would have been fine with us.

Someone remembers that! I worked at CyberCash. I was the primary author of the merchant server component (CashRegister, MCK, SMPS, whatever it was called) for a couple of years, before it got handed off to another team and I was assigned to the SET project (does anybody remember that piece of crap?). It was the first C++ app I ever wrote, and I was a college student, so I literally had the Stephens books on Unix and TCP/IP open on my desk as I worked 14 hours a day to complete the first version. They hired me full time after that and I eventually rewrote most of it to not suck as much. There was ONE version that leaked no memory, all the others were pretty much crap. Sorry about that to anyone who was using it at the time. :) It was all designed before SSL was implemented in browsers so it used real RSA crypto which was fun to work on (those parts were written by graybeards, I just did all the integration). All that stuff probably should have just been a web service / API but at the time nobody really knew how to build web apps and there was no other way to do end-to-end security, so it was all written from scratch. It was plain C++. STL was flaky and Boost didn't exist. I basically wrote a web server and a database and an asynch message processing daemon all rolled in one app that sat between the consumer wallet and the central cybercash gateway which unwrapped everything and talked to the "real" bank. Fun project!

I met (and dated) the (unquestionably) hottest girl I ever have while I was unemployed and living at home in my 30's.

I think it happened because I was relaxed and open to new things at the time. When I am working I'm very focussed, and work takes priority. I'm no fun. The most important thing is to BE A FUN PERSON and then people will want to be around you.

Yeah, that's pretty good. :)

Like this one? I only post in low id threads these days, if I stumble across one. Ha.

I still read slashdot, I just don't really have time to moderate/post comments...

I think my dad has played those games... I'm a lifelong gamer thanks to dad, but this article might qualify for smallest number of comments in 2009, if that a category.

Anonymous reader, you are a winner!