Everything's good again. It's fine. I'm good. Got past the recent emotional stuff. Getting better at it. Going to start regular posting again on Monday. I think I just needed the break so I could get some practice with doing emotional crap. I don't get it, and I think I ought to given the human-being aspect of my life.

Enough about me for once.

Lloyd Humphreys is this kid I met over in the Channel 9 Coffeehouse. I could've sworn he was fifteen, though his site says he's fourteen. I'll let him clear that up. When you're thirty, a year (or ten) doesn't make much of a difference, but when you're thirteen or fourteen, it can mean the difference between soprano and baritone. A year is a long time to a wee lad.

I count Lloyd among my "online" friends. The people I don't get to hang out with in meatspace, but who I would hang out with in meatspace if their meatspace wasn't on the other side of the planet.

All my life, I've had friends who were much younger and much older than me. I hang out at a coffee shop where I converse somewhat regularly with several people who're just about in their eighties. I don't like them because of "wisdom" or the other things people like to attribute to old age. I think wisdom is the consolation prize for having been dumb your entire life, but also for having had to remember it. Rather, I like them because they're interesting, funny, good conversationalists.

People sometimes ask me about these huge age differences. They aren't too surprised by the people who're in their eighties, but when I tell them that one of my youngest friends is fifteen (unless he's fourteen like his site says), eyes bug out. People think I'm insane. Or a creep.

I find those people creepy. If I meet someone who's freaked out by my having young and old friends, I feel like it's those people who shouldn't be socializing outside their age groups. Whatever creepy goings-on they might be thinking of never cross my mind, but they're obviously crossing theirs. Would they do something creepy in my place? Makes you wonder.

Lloyd reminds me of myself in a lot of ways. When I was fifteen (or fourteen - get it straight, Lloyd, you little bastard), I hung out with people who were twice my age and more. I got to visit Intel and Symantec with these guys. They'd pick me up in their fast, fancy cars, and drive me out to their tech companies where I got to see amazing stuff long before it hit the market or even became rumors. I got to hold one of the first Pentium Pro CPUs. Nobody knew about them at the time. It was all hush-hush.

Down at Symantec, I got to see the web for the first time. I'd had a Unix dial-up account for a while, but, though I'd heard of it, I'd never seen the web. I thought it was for pussies. I was all about IRC, usenet, FTP, FSP, and other names/acronyms. But there it was. An image popped up in a browser, and I was floored.

I got to tour a game company in the middle of the night where we played networked DOOM (the original) back when almost nobody got to play on networks.

I got to visit Bootleg. We all had handles. They were dorky, geeky things. One of my good friends was recognized to be one of the better hackers around. His name was Kryptic Knight. Dorky. Way dorky. But I loved those guys. Sicily was another. Trident. Homer. Fong. Thing One. Milkman. I was Rob Bob.

And, as I said, Bootleg. Bootleg had this big old dusty house that was filled with old equipment. Computers and monitors were stacked waist-high throughout his home. You had to walk through the trenches to get anywhere.

I went out there one day with Scrooge to say hi and see what was doing. Bootleg had these huge beige boxes that looked like washing machines. He had stacks of reel-to-reel tapes. They were the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles records for every driver in the state. He was pulling all the records and stuffing them inside a database. We all eventually got copies, and were then able to get a person's name, phone number, address, and more just by entering their license plate info into the database's search field. We felt powerful, and rightly so.

Bootleg eventually tried to sell the discs, but got shut down. It was fun to have the info among ourselves - taking down the license plates of people who messed with us, or who were parked like assholes - but it wasn't the best idea to get that same info out to the public. So it goes.

Given what an amazing, fantastic, brilliant, entertaining genius of a writer I am, I get asked about where I learned to do it. It was with those guys. We all ran BBSs. Kryptic Knight's was a true hacker board where, provided you were allowed access, you could get the kind of info everybody pretended to have - except he actually had it. Sicily was more about the technology, beating us all to the first GUI BBS we'd ever seen (I think the software was called "RoboBoard," though it was a long time ago). My site was known for its forums, and it was one of the most popular in 5o3. People redialed and redialed for the chance to get their sixty minutes a day on my phone line so they could get their posts in.

We discussed everything. Religion, movies, coding, telephony... I learned a lot. I stayed home from school all the time so I could run that board, play in the forums, and hang out with my hacker crew. It was a better education by far than what I was getting in high-school.

When I began writing in the forums, I DID EVERYTHING IN ALL CAPS AND I MADE GRAMITICAL ERRERS AND MISPELLD THINGS AND HAD RUNON SENTINSIS AND GENREALLY EXPRESSD MYSELF PORLY.

Nobody took me seriously as long as I wrote like that, so I learned to write well. The day I realized I had to improve my writing was when I got all kinds of crap for having told someone that he had terrible "grammer." It reminds me of something wonderful that I heard in a French class - the teacher was talking about prepositions. I didn't know what prepositions were, and, from the way he was talking about them, I got the feeling that they were important. All the other kids acted like they knew, so I was the odd one out. Never especially concerned with possibly looking stupid, I asked: "What's a preposition?" It got a few giggles. Some people probably thought I was joking, but the others took the opportunity to point fingers and laugh at the dumb kid.

A girl responded to my question: "Prepositions are the words we don't end sentences with."

Two minutes later, I Got prepositions, and proceeded to laugh for the last twenty minutes of class. I'll never forget that girl's answer.

But, back to the geeks... if you didn't express yourself well, you weren't respected, and neither were your thoughts. It was boot camp for writers. Not only were these people teaching me all about life and mischief, they were also largely responsible for my learning how to write well.

Those were some of the best years of my life. I was part of a club of highly intelligent weirdos. Admission to the club was based entirely on what was up in your noggin. We had bad stutterers and stammerers and all kinds of awkwardness in human form. You weren't judged by superficial things like having an extra leg or being half to a third to a quarter of the age of the people you hung out with.

I look at people like Lloyd and Yuvi, and I see some of the greatest aspects of my pre-adult years in their lives. Yeah, Lloyd isn't old enough to drive in the States. He wouldn't be allowed into an R rated movie, and he couldn't buy an MA rated game. But he and Yuvi can hold their own intellectually. They're highly creative, ambitious, and have, as you'd expect, the best qualities youth has to offer.

I have quite a few friends in the 19-23 year-old age group, and I love them. I tend to date young, too. I'm sure people have their own opinions as to why that is, but it comes down to a couple things, neither of which is "bad":

1. Naivete. I think most people, before around the age of twenty-five, tend to be very naive. This is a good quality, and one I don't want to lose. I'm told all the time that I'm naive, and I'm thankful for it. Naivete is like cynicism-repellent, and cynicism is one of the worst things that happen to anyone. When you're cynical, you stop believing in yourself. You find the worst in people, decide nothing's ever going to change, and then you rot in yourself. I've had my moments there - we all do - but I always dig myself out. Cynicism is not allowed into The County of Neopoleon.

2. Ambition. When you combine ambition with naivete, you get amazing things. When you combine ambition with naivete and intelligence, you get... well, super amazing things. When you're naive, you don't know what you're up against, so the world looks like one big opportunity. When you're ambitious, you have the drive to take advantage of that opportunity. When you're intelligent, you give that ambition direction, and you can accomplish just about anything. When I was twenty-one, I wrote a Linux textbook in twelve days. It was only 25,000 words, but it was a hell of an accomplishment. I've been meaning to dig it up, as a friend of mine needs to learn about Linux, and I think it'd be cool if she learned from my book.

It's unavoidable that you're going to lose some naivete. That's life. But as long as you can avoid cynicism, you can continue to kick ass for as long as you want/can.

That's part of the attraction of youth. I get motivated when I listen to my younger friends talk about their big ideas. I love giving them guidance on how they can really get going on them. It's a good feeling.

So, when I say that one of my friends is fifteen (or fourteen - damn you, Lloyd), this is what I'm thinking about. I think about all the experiences I was fortunate to have because I had older friends. All along the way in life, I've had someone there to nudge me in the right direction and give me the confidence to follow my gut. Science, computers, music, writing, my career, and all the rest were things I pursued while being helped along by people who had more experience, but who also saw my potential and wanted to help me realize it.

That's not very creepy.

Right now, Yuvi is working on something to do with my religion (I'll finish the story - starting to get my motivation back). I have no idea what he's going to do, though I expect his young thinkmeat will come up with something interesting. Novelty comes naturally to youth because your head isn't cluttered with patterns. You have a lot of mental room in which to maneuver.

And Lloyd, to get back to part of the title of this post, just put together a tutorial for Microsoft's Channel 8. Channel 8 is part of the JeffSand Team Channel X family. I could be wrong about who's in charge, but I think it's a JeffSand thing.

So, Lloyd's this kid, and he's already putting his skills to work by teaching others How to Do Things. He's a positive thinker, full of ambition, intelligence, and the ability to follow through on his plans.

I have my own three part video for Channel 8. Clint Rutkas axed me to do it. So I did it. It done did. Should be up before too long.

But... Lloyd. And Yuvi. The two teens I've watched most in tech - I don't know what's bouncing around inside their heads, but I feel lucky that I get to be here and take part in some of it. It feels like it's my turn to take the role of the people who've helped me out along the way. That isn't to say that Lloyd and Yuvi need guidance. They certainly don't need me. But I can at least be a cheerleader for them.

Carry on, people.

Carry on.