My ace in the hole as a human being used to be my capacity for remembering birthdays. I worked at it. Whenever I made a new friend, I made a point of finding out his or her birthday early on, and I would record it in my Filofax calendar.

When I was a kid, phone calls were a premium commodity; only the very coolest kids had a phone line of their own, and long-distance phone calls were made after eleven, when the rates went down, unless you were flamboyant with your spending. Then phone calls became as cheap as dirt and as constant as rain, and I was on the phone all the time.

When I still lived in Manhattan, people-watching was my hobby, and I spent many Sunday afternoons eating up the scene from a window seat at a Starbucks on Broadway.

Most fourth graders can't say why Abraham Lincoln is an important historical figure? Wow. This is far more distressing than if the news had been that fourth graders were bad at reciting multiplication tables, because you can, in fact, Google that.

Writing about someone well known removes that obligation of defending it as a subject, but it also means that some of the surprise and freshness is already gone. It's so different - in some ways much harder for me.

Recently, I have come to assume that any call to my landline is from a telemarketer or an automated call from Terminex, letting me know that our regularly scheduled pest-extermination service will occur on its regular schedule. So I usually ignore my home phone.

I have worked on PCs and on Macs and, while I have my preferences, I don't find it crippling to work on one rather than the other.