while wget --mirror --output-document=- http://www.northcountrygazette.org/ > /dev/null 2>&1 || true;do echo lol;done

Doesn't use any storage space, and emits amusing completion note per cycle. Gives that sense of accomplishment as a high note to your latte sippage.

So very true. My play growing up was much the same - had to be home by the time streetlights came on, beyond that it was up to me to buy my own gunpowder to blow stuff up, so I had to do chores to get any money from the 'rents. We moved all over the place, and everywhere new was a world to explore and find all the fun places in. And that was just 25 years ago.

So much has changed, with plusses and minuses. This lack of real-world play experience is definitely a minus. Really though, as far as I'm concerned, that's just parents screwing up their kids (which pretty much everyone does one way or another, usually to a lesser degree). I'm expecting a big wave of "discover nature 'n stuff" amongst the technokid set as adults in another decade or two. Sort of starting to see it already in places.

I still love the smell of burned black powder. It's the magic smoke output of fun-right-now. Just thinking of it makes me smile and remember how much fun smacking two rocks together can be when friends are involved and there's stuff to blow up.

....and turning into SUCH an old curmudgeon.

He's an entertaining curmudgeon, certainly. He's brilliant, and accomplished, and talented, and all that stuff.... ...but he's doing the crotchety-old-bastard thing more and more, and if he's not careful, it's going to be his vehicle into the twilight of irrelevance.

I do hope he starts to talk directly to the folks he should be addressing: The people who realize all by themselves the problems of (regression to the mean)/(difficulties of expertise)/(relevancy of relevance and evaluation)/(academy vs/cum practice)/(and so on), and seek relevancy and insight accordingly. Amongst those folks are the grand wizards of technology, the people who are able to leverage knowledge into grand effect (engineers, hardware and software designers, genomicists, politicians, economists, large-corp executives, the very rich, etc), and THOSE are the minds he needs to be talking to and conversing with.

Everyone else is pretty much irrelevant for such purposes.

And....

I hope he loses all that extra weight really damn soon and fixes his eating and exercise habits, he's going to die early (and his cognition will go down hill PDQ), and that would suck. I'm hoping to see his new ideas for quite some time to come. Take care of yourself, Jaron.