Samuel Pepys
I had lunch with my father yesterday. We were in a cafe downtown discussing the differences between blogs, wikis, and other web sites (I’m getting him setup online), and he was astonished when I didn’t get his reference to Samuel Pepys’ use of cypher text to protect his journals vis. the utter lack of modesty/secrecy seen in the blogosphere now. He opined that the American school system had utterly failed my generation (he went through British-style boarding schools in Jamaica in the 50s and then went on to graduate work in English Lit.). I countered that while it might be shocking that I had never heard of Pepys, had I majored in Reformation English Lit., I didn’t feel that I was lacking in this particular case. I also pointed out that it would be a bit like my being shocked that he doesn’t get the one about the inverse-square law describing how well received an audio engineering joke is likely to be at a coctail party.
In other news, I’ve implemented OpenID for inter-site identity management. It seems to work reasonably well.