Someday your whole life will be on the Net.

Earlier this week I had a very odd experience. A talk session (talk is a UNIX chat program) from my parents. I suspect that even today most people would find it a little odd to get a chat request from a parent. But this was downright strange as my parents were on vacation in Costa Rica.

I guess I should have seen it coming. I introduced my mom to email maybe 10 years ago, and dad not long after. I was going to Boston University at the time and, while they only lived 40 miles away, it saved on long distance.

My parents are not computer people. Mom is a librarian at Brown and dad an Economics professor at Bryant College. Every time I get home, which is rare now that I live in Colorado, there is a list of things for me to fix or install on their Mac. Hell, half the time the VCR is blinking 12:00... But to have email they had to learn about telnet and pine and other quirky software. Higher-Ed often lacks the latest greatest GUI tools.

And this week when they found a little Internet cafe in San Jose, Costa Rica they put that knowledge to use.

But that's where this story starts, not where it ends.

Finding it strange and needing to tell the world, I dropped a note to /dev/null, a mail list I'm on. /dev/null collects and distributes random bits of interesting stuff found floating on the net. I wasn't sure it would be interesting enough for the list, but apparently it was as the message went to the list.

Six or seven years ago I had a cat. Her name was Abbie and she was a great cat. I loved Abbie and she seemed rather attached to me. But I got a new housemate who hated the cat to the point of physically abusing it. And while I would have liked to get rid of the housemate, in the end I found Abbie a better home. And I never saw her again, until today.

Today I received an email from the person I gave Abbie to. He'd seen the message about my parents' trip, and wrote me to say "Hi" and let me know Abbie was fine. And to give me a URL where I could find pictures of her.

Someday your whole life will be on the Net.

Epilog:

Abbie died in March of 1998, but she still lives on the Net.

Postscript:

This was writen in January 1997. I suspect that since I wrote it many more people of come to know the strange feeling of having bits of your past scattered about the Internet.