Kickin it old school

Early this week I found myself writing a CGI script. An old-style CGI script.

Ok, I'm not talking like Matt's Script Archive full of security-holes &format(*INFO); old-style; I at least use-d CGI.pm. But it was still chock-full of print "<tr><td>"; and the like. Did we really build the early web on this crap? (although I bet a lot of java servlets are still written this way...)

Nowadays I mostly use HTML::Mason for anything interesting, it's just so much more natural to type the needed HTML code as ... well, HTML. And, to complete the circle, yesterday when I needed to extend the functionality of my hack, I rewrote it in Mason. I feel better now.

The end of trivia?

I'm getting to really hate wikipedia and google.

It used to be that a person with a good memory for random facts could occasionally impress people by whipping out something like "The hundred years war actually lasted 116 years," or "Light takes 8.3 minutes to get from the sun to the earth," or reciting entire passages from "The Princess Bride." I used to fill my brain up with facts like these from the kind of books that you can open to any page and start reading (bathroom readers, Guinness Book of World Records, etc.) or by watching the movie over and over again.

But now, anyone can find this kind of info faster and more accurately (or at least with citations) with a quick google search, which usually lands you on wikipedia. And with the prevalence of iPhones and the like that can access google from anywhere, we're not even safe in bars anymore.

Tell me, is there a place for an old-fashioned trivia buff anymore?

I guess I'm not the only one