in which my daughter requests a bulk data transfer

It begins with a mobile voice call:

Me: Dude! Sup?

Her: Can you please mail me dataset 2356?

Me: No, I can't mail it to you, it's about 2 gig.

Her: Okay, put it in my Dropbox then?

Me: Sure, I'm at the grocery store, send me the ID number?

Her: OK

My daughter is 13 years old. Her Dropbox is a secure data server somewhere out in the cloud of the internet. That she called me using her actual voice instead of sending an SMS text is significant: it tells me that this is so important that it needs isochronous response.

I can't think of a single event in my youth that is in the least bit analogous.  Oddly, I'm pleased at the nature of the request. O brave new world, that has such beautious people in't!

of words and presentation

This entry is a prelude to my next entry which wanted to incorporate an idea I had in a university English Composition class far too long ago. I didn't save much of my college work, as it wasn't worth keeping, but this class - and in particular, the instructor, really inspired me. I think I was taking a course in rhetoric contemporaneously, so my thoughts were clearly informed by that.

Through the magic of Optical Character recognition - and Knuth's "Computer Modern Roman" font -  resurrecting my old composition from paper was a trivial effort. I've included it here as an historical artifact. It was written so, so long ago, with a prose style that one would expect of an undergraduate. I've resisted the temptation to revise it so you - gentle reader - may simply wish to skip it and wait for the next post which really does have something to say and will excerpt a couple of sentences from the essay below the fold.

I'm also trying to forget that my copy of this essay has begun to yellow around the edges.