More important than the skinny ones.

To stay on topic, http://www.kfat.com/.

Time to find another hobby Doug.

In all seriousness, the tendency to play with tech has proven very valuable in life.

Sure, it means the occasional foolish lark like this. It also means learning about stuff on a level that, when applied to tough business problems, delivers significant value.

I've come to realize we really don't get one without the other. Rather than entertain the inhibitions that go along with that road, I simply do play when I'm inclined to do so, knowing it will pay off the aggregate.

The day I no longer feel playful around technology is the day I really do need to start doing something else. Not there just yet!

Hey, I like it. I think my butt grew the same amount overnight after all the Halloween candy, so it's a useful measuring tool.

No fat butted trick or treaters at my house..maybe cause it looks like something that should be featured on Ghost Hunters !

Not to worry Doug, I still get teased for not owning an iPod.

Whew! I looked at the thread title and thought they were talking about me!

I think it's important. After all, goofing around with stuff has found flaws in quite a few things, or have come up with new uses for things.
Sorta makes me wonder if back when someone working on Arpanet, one of them was saying "what if every home had a computer, and they were all connected on a network?"

It is important. I do wonder if they had those kinds of thoughts back then. If they did, I don't think they really groked what was gonna happen.

One interesting Internet time was the realization that TC-IP V4 would not have the address space needed to post everybody up in cyberspace.

The NAT was also seeing early use then and many older school Internet users complained about the many small lights on the net going dark...

Used to be, if I wanted a file from somewhere, I would connect directly to their machine, log in, leave credentials for the logs, get the file and move on. Same for information. Services like gopher, archie, etc... were running in many places.

Now we've got web servers everywhere and they are powerful and all that, but we have everybody living behind NATS too, which limited the simple peer to peer uses of the net. eg: Nobody hosts their home pictures from their house.

(andrew and others being a rare exception)

They host them at some sharing service. And that's one really bright light, and a point of failure and control. Two things the early net builders absolutely didn't want to occur.