It was the summer of 1969. I was in Lawrence, Kansas, scratching chigger bytes, watching Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon, and attending journalism classes at the University of Kansas.

I was a high school kid attending a summer program along with a bunch of other high school kids. I was learning to write headlines and run a radio show. My roommate was studying fourth-dimensional math, something about turning a tennis ball inside out without harming it. Other kids were studying the trombone or, judging from observed behavior, card-playing.

A couple of months ago, when a small Pennsylvania newspaper started testing Press+ technology, there arose such a clatter in the online journalism world that you would have thought somebody had set up a Mapplethorpe exhibit in a church lobby.

I first became interested in computers in the 1970s, back when cars were big, hair was long, gas was cheap, and beer cost 25 cents a glass.

We've come a long way since I first started coding Web pages in 1994. If you read this post on my blog -- not on Facebook, Google Reader, etc. -- and use a modern Web browser, the first five words of this post are rendered in a font that probably is nowhere to be found on your computer.

Decades ago I read a business book by Robert Ringer called "Winning Through Intimidation." Ringer is a political kook (he's gotten much worse over the years) and more than a bit paranoid, but he sounded a warning that should be the first rule of commerce for every consumer and every businessperson: Everybody else at the table is out to take your chips.

A commenter accuses me of "political prejudice" against Fox "News." I think a better word is postjudice. My scorn is not free. Fox has earned it.

And repeatedly so. Here's a clip in which Jon Stewart shows yet another case of Fox spreading a lie, in this case by editing a video of President Obama to suggest he was saying something completely different from what he actually said.

It is nine years now since the day America lost its mind. Since the day a small band of hate-filled terrorists opened the door to madness, and our nation walked right through. Since the day when the entire world was moved to stand as one (a French newspaper proclaimed: "We are all Americans!") but we didn't notice because we were filled with grief, fear and rage.

For a moment on that day, we forgot our differences. Southern crackers and Detroit homeboys and Amarillo cowboys were all Americans, and all New Yorkers.