My son went off to college, enthusiastically telling me how he and his roommate planned to have a turntable in their living room to play vinyl.

"Are you kidding?" I asked. "Do you know what a hassle it is to deal with records?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, like having to turn the record over half-way through."

"What? You don't still have to do that, do you?"

There is (was?) an Amazon Go store across the street from my office in San Francisco.

I went there a few times and was fine with the bizarre experience of "just walking out" with things I'd picked off the shelves.

But nowdays many stores no longer have an 'Open' sign lit up when they're doing business, so the only way to tell if they're open is to see if there are cashiers up front.

Since the Amazon Go store doesn't have cashiers, and of course doesn't have anything as uncool as an 'Open' sign, I can never tell if the store is actually open or not. So I just walk by.

How many sheets of 8-1/2" x 11" sheets of paper?

I'm still perfectly happy with my Samsung Note 8! (Well, except for lousy night-time photos ...)

They are getting taller. I wish they would come out with wider models.

We don't have a battery to go with our rooftop solar because the price was too high, and the breakeven point was "never". Every solar company I spoke with said not to bother with a battery at this point because it currently made no economic sense.

If you have facts to counter what I've been told I'd be open to hearing them, but you should realize that many people won't bother paying attention to anyone who revels in sticking their tongue out and name-calling.

Yeah, I like working at night ... I can get into a coding groove without a bunch of meetings and Slack messages.

But when I send an email, I schedule it (Outlook and Gmail both support this) to be sent the next morning ... I found people get wigged out seeing an email that was sent at 3am ...

You left out the fact that it had a built-in acoustic modem! So, yeah, it was the perfect beast for journalists ... I remember reading about it back in the day.

Back in the late 1970's somebody came on Tom Snyder's Tomorrow show with a voice stress analyzer that was supposed to do this very thing.

One thing I remember: the circuitry was encased in some kind of ceramic or plastic so that anyone trying to tear it down to see how it worked would destroy the circuitry, making analysis impossible. He said that approach was better than a patent, which others would just infringe upon.

When I was a kid (1960's) we read comic books (and played hide-and-seek, baseball, etc., etc.) because we had to come up with our own ways of being entertained. With smart phones in their pocket and a 75" TV showing cartoons 24 hours a day kids no longer have to hunt for entertainment or stimulation: it's slopped in their faces from the time they can walk.

In the early 1980's some of the Marvel lines - particularly Daredevil - were pretty good. And Pacific Comics was an indie publisher with some great titles, such as Twisted Tales.

By the 2000's when my kids were starting to read we would read old comics I bought on eBay, as well as Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes. The new comics you could find (in comic book stores) didn't seem to be written for kids, but for adult collectors or the super-geeky with the patience to follow a complicated universe and its twisting soap opera plotlines.

For young people today, the phrase "comic book" makes them think of a movie franchise, not anything printed on paper. And if the latest Black Widow movie is anything to go by, they're missing out on an awful lot.

For me? I read comics sometimes to relax when going to bed ... but only scans of old comics (mostly pre-1970) - mystery, horror, sci-fi and romance (they're a riot!) - downloaded from sites like comicbookplus and loaded onto my 12" tablet.

When I was kid I was really into making things with Legos.

About thirty years later I forked out to spend a few nights at Legoland hotel in San Diego.

But this wasn't because I hadn't outgrown Legos ... it was because my kids were in that phase of life, and they loved it!

I would expect that most customers of this Star Wars hotel are going because they want to show their kids a good time.

Yep, if I have to listen to one more Judas Priest album while the FDA fiddles its thumbs I'll go nuts.

It's an emu.

And not just in the computing field. There was an article in the New Yorker a couple of years ago about this topic. From memory, it discussed the steel industry. Apparently smaller upstart steel manufacturers were making much cheaper steel, but at a lower quality, fit only for rebar and similar low-end usage. So the big companies weren't worried about them. But the low-end manufacturers kept improving the quality of the product, eating into more and more of the established players' market share.

Same with me.

For Amazon it was surprisingly chaotic, as if implemented by Google.