This little anecdote from my childhood popped into my head the other day. One birthday, my tenth I believe, I got a present from my parents in the form of my own telephone line. I even remember the number: 822-6024.

See, when my older sister was a teenager, she spent a large amount of time on the phone and my parents wanted to head that one off before it became an annoyance with me. This was great bragging rights with my friends, and became handy years later for late-night phone calls with boyfriends... but honestly, it wasn't at the top of my list.

But, what I was excited about was how cool and grown-up it would be to have my name in the phone book!  I was kind of obsessed at around that age at being "grown up," and MY VERY OWN NAME in the phone book was enough to make me beg and plead with my mom who was was completely reluctant, afraid it would be a dangerous invasion of privacy. 

So she unlisted the number, right?

No.  She had it put in, but without using my name, using a general phrase for the listing instead:

"Teen line"

*slaps forehead*

At the time, my thought was just omgMom,sosuperlame.  Looking back with less innocent eyes now, I realize how hilariously ironic that was in the name of safety.

(No, I never got any weird phone calls.  Those came a couple years later, when we moved to Oakville and my phone number was 844-4258, while the Beer Store's was 845-4258.)

Bah, I hate being a bad guy like this. Members site rips have been turning up on bittorrent sites, and my usual thing is to post a nice comment but have them removed. I wish people just used a little common sense instead. I don't mind if a bit of stuff gets posted, but not entire galleries/site rips, and not content that contains other people (ie. friends who may not want their images to have as wide an audience as I do, heh). I ask if they can put a little note saying this but ultimately they always just put it on the forbidden list and I feel like a hypocrite *pout*

Speaking of the members site (if you don't know the url, ask me), I think it's reached that point where it's got most of the kinks worked out (well, the bad kind *grin*) and all the initial content/features together. The only thing I'm stuck waiting for until the next version of aMember (projected: end of October) is the rebilling, so you'll have to do a longer membership right now. I rock. Came up with another solution for rebilling in the meantime. So if you were waiting until it was "ready" before subscribing, I'd say it's ready!

In other news, you totally wanna check out the photos I found of me at nerd camp (aka. Shad Valley) when I was 17 :)

Raise your hand if you had a parallel Connectix QuickCam.

*raises hand*

Raise your hand if you occasionally brought out your 486 laptop even after you stopped using it for BBSing in order to use it plus the QuickCam like a portable digital camera.

*raises hand*

Raise your ha... okay, enough.  There is a point to this other than nerdy bantering.  In sorting out backups and defining network storage areas, I came across some photos I took of where I lived in my pre/early teens  :)