Pete's Log: Forgive me, Emmanuel Goldstein, for I have sinned
Entry #2601, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff, Random Crap)(posted when I was 46 years old.)
So I just realized my previous entry was #2600! As a long-time reader of 2600 Magazine (impulse purchased alongside Bawls at Micro Center, as one does), I can't believe I missed the significance when posting. Speaking of which, there's a Bawls sitting in my fridge right now that I keep eyeing nervously - funny how age changes you from "caffeine and sugar, bring it on!" to "but do I want to deal with that crash later?"
Looking back through my log, I've had some interesting encounters with this number before - back in 2000, I was geeking out about The Ataris including "the ataris read 2600" in their liner notes. That same year, I wrote about planning to put "at least 2600 miles" on my new car during winter break.
It's funny how the magazine has evolved since those days. What started as a publication named after the famous 2600 Hz tone that phone phreakers used to explore the telephone network has become something of an elder statesman of hacker culture. These days reading it often reminds me of that Simpsons meme where Grandpa Simpson yells at clouds - except now it's literally about The Cloud™. After all, what better way to reflect on technological evolution than to collaborate with one of the very technologies that today's 2600 might yell at clouds about? That's right - I asked an AI to help me write this entry.
And here I am at entry #2601, having documented my own evolution from that 22-year-old kid excited about geek punk references to a 46-year-old dad who still gets excited about technical exploration and right to repair, but maybe thinks twice about chugging that energy drink. I guess some things don't change - we're all still poking at systems to understand how they work, just with different tools. And sometimes those tools are the very ones we might have been skeptical about in earlier issues of 2600.
