The thinnest tendrils of dawn are creeping in from the east. People in New York are softly starting to tweet.

Let me give you some advice: make friends with a millionaire when he's a friendless sixth-grader.

So I switch to my MacBook and make my rounds: news sites, blogs, tweets. I scroll back to find the conversations that happened without me during the day. When every single piece of media you consume is time-shifted, does that mean it’s actually you that’s time-shifted?

It turns out Dungeons & Dragons is much better on paper than it is in reality.

Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.

But I kept at it with the help-wanted ads. My standards were sliding swiftly. At first I had insisted I would only work at a company with a mission I believed in. Then I thought maybe it would be fine as long as I was learning something new. After that I decided it just couldn't be evil. Now I was carefully delineating my personal definition of evil.

Our books still do not require batteries. But I am no fool. It is a slender advantage.