bite-sized education

Today I was wearing my there's no place like 127.0.0.1 shirt, and thus found myself explaining as much of how the Internet is put together as will fit in an elevator ride in a tall office building. I explained to my inquirer that while he's used to referring to sites by names, computers also have numbers, like this, and that this particular number is very special: it refers to "this computer that I'm typing on right now". Oh, he said, like "home base". Ding.

At that moment the elevator arrived in the lobby, so we did not get into IPv6.

speed-writing

The Writers site on Stack Exchange has a weekly writing challenge -- somebody throws out a topic, you write for ten minutes, and then share what you've got. I decided to try it this week. The topic was "high school crush".
( Read more... )