From a friend:

I'm reading The Gangs of New York and learned that in the years following the Civil War my neighborhood was called SATAN'S CIRCUS! Evidently walking through the 20's between 5th and 7th Aves you couldn't spit without hitting a whorehouse.

Kind of like Starbucks now.

From the July 1982 issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows describes Living With a Computer. It echoes thoughts I had when first working with computers (and seeing friends who weren't):

The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen

But he also talks about things that make me chuckle today, such as spending "$800 for a cut-rate disk drive" to store up to 100k on a single disk (to get around the 48k RAM limit). He also discusses the state of the OS battles:

My system uses the North Star Disk Operating System, abbreviated DOS and pronounced doss, but North Star didn't win. The winner was a DOS called CP/M (for Control Program for Microcomputers), which has become the industry standard and is earning millions for a formerly small company known as Digital Research.
...
Digital Research has produced a version called CP/ M-86, which will work on the [IBM] Personal Computer and other 16-bit systems ... but many people suspect that IBM will wage a counteroffensive with a DOS of its own.

Bill who?

Phone Scoop is a nice community site with information about cellular phones and services. In addition to locally hosted reviews of equipment and service plans, it also has a gateway to the alt.cellular newsgroups.

Six preliminary concept designs for the World Trade Center site were announced today. See scale models, maps, and descriptions at renewnyc.com.

Here's a nice convenience site that reduces the amount of time you need to search around redhat.com or mandrake.com just to download ISO CD images: LinuxISO.org. Many distributions (including some BSD distros as well) are there, ready for downloading, plus pages to help newbies with burning and such. I haven't tested their bandwidth 'cause I just recently downloaded Mandrake 8.2 images from an official Mandrake mirror.

Vacation begins today. We're off to Spring Lake, NJ on the New Jersey Shore, not too far from the beach seen on this web cam.