 Stand by one minute. I have a terrible cold, and I took a million decongestants in an attempt to not come up here and sneeze on you. But it made me a little stupid. So who knows how this is going to go? It is true. I live here in Durham, which means that I only seen Nathaniel at conferences when we're both out of town. It really is true. And then we run into each other conferences, and we say, we should really get together. And so we finally get in, and he invited me. So I'm grateful to be here. Thank you to the Payments and Fendt people. We were just talking to some folks down here about conferences and how so many conferences are huge. And it's such a treat to see a group this size, where you can all meet each other. Who knows what's going to happen to this conference? It could become a real thing. It could go on for years and years and years. And in the future, you're going to be the people that were here first. And you're going to remember the people that you met here. And the reason is, OK, I don't have the event organization gene, so if it were up to me, we would never get to have a conference. But I go to a fair number of conferences, and I'm really keenly aware of how much they help us build community. And it's also usually true at conferences that whatever you pay to get in here does not pay for it. And so sponsors, they're sponsors somewhere. Be sure you thank them before you go. But it's also true that there are a bunch of people who put time and effort into making this happen. And I have not met them all. There's people out at the front. Elliot had my dongle and Nathaniel was here. Like, you probably know that I was at home in my hammock all day because I'm sick. So you know who they are more than me. But you should thank them before you go. Like, it's a lot of effort. It only pays back in the feeling of satisfaction for making community. So it helps to make them put a conference on for you again if you go shake their hands and tell them how much you enjoyed it. So I'm here at the end of this long day to tell you your future. Now, I am going to tell you your future. It's going to happen in about 20 minutes. But between now and then, I'm going to tell you your past, or at least the past of some of you. If you look like me, if you came from Europe, this will be your past. If you're from the Far East, if you're a Korean or Japanese or Chinese, this part of your history is a little different, the same thing if you were from the Americas. But eventually, all these pasts converge into the today that we have now. So I'm going to tell you a form of history, scrolls. First invented probably maybe 7,000 years ago, they were certainly, for sure, they were in Egypt by 3,000 BCE. And so what this is is a plant that's papyrus, and that's ink. There's some kind of ink on it. And it was written on with a quill or a metal tubing. Now, this is what the writing looked like. You can see that there's not much in the way of spaces or punctuation. Like all the letters sort of run together. There was no indication of one thought in it and another one began. If you could read, it was assumed that you could figure this out. And so that was the very latest in technology from when they first appeared right up around, I'm going to say the year zero, even though I know the number line people hate me for that. I think of it as I'm not a numbery kind of person. So for that 3,000 year part of history, that was really all we had. And about right around the year zero, the Romans sort of got fed up with it, and they invented something called the codex. Now, codex is just a book. This is a book. You can see there are leaves here, and it's bound together along one edge. This is actually leaves. They're made of really thin wood, and there's wax. They have a wax coating. You can scratch a record on it. You can scratch a note, and then you can etch a sketch. You can erase it later. So it's like a reusable note taker. There are also random access. This is a significant technological advance over a scroll. You can easily open it to any page instead of having to roll to that part. And it's really easy to fix a certain page. If it gets damaged, you can just pull the binding off the end and put a new page in. So codexes are super handy. They're a really nice advance. So starting with the Romans right around the year zero, then books began to be created by monks in what they called scriptoriums of monastery. And so as far as I can understand from reading on Wikipedia, a scriptorium is like a co-working space for writing. And the scriptoriums are always attached to the libraries. So everything they're working with in the scriptorium is extremely flammable. And because they're attached to the libraries, what it means is the heat is never on. And there's crowds of people whose job it is to work in the scriptorium and write things in the cold by hand. And they do what you would do. You know that thing where you write, if you're grumpy about some program you're working on, you might write a snarky little comment. There's a whole bunch of books from this era that have little snarky comments in the margins where the monks talk about my feet are cold. My hand is cramped. There's grumpy as you were. There's a lot of side comment from this era of history. This painting is from 692, and it was commissioned. And done in 692, it shows a monk working on a codex. And so monks, this is all happening in monasteries. Monks are religious people, so of course, they mostly wrote religious things. Here's a sample of the work that they did. This is Latin, and it's from a Psalter, which means it's part of the book of Psalms. And this was written around 1300. And you can see, it's really changed from what we saw originally in the scroll. Sentences clearly have a beginning and ending. There's a special kind of character being used at the beginning of paragraphs and the beginning of sentences. And, sorry, and it looks like a font. And it actually, this is a hand-written font, but it actually has a name. It's Gothic liturgical hand. This piece of paper was written, well, this document, I should say, was written by hand using a quill on parchment. Now quills are, they started using quills around the year 600. The very best quill for a right-handed writer was the left primary wing feather of a goose. A big book like The Complete Bible takes about five years to copy. And a quill lasts, every quill lasts about a week. So you're gonna need a lot of geese. And the parchment, what they're writing on is made from sheets. So, and a big book is gonna take hundreds of sheets, and that means you're gonna need a lot of sheep. Really high quality parchment is something called vellum, but it's made from, it's really nice. It's much smoother, it's supple, it's easy to work with, but it's made from baby sheep and all the pictures broke my heart, so we don't have any pictures of vellum. Here's another example. This is an etypinal, it's 13th century sheet music. It's just absolutely beautiful. There's a million of these documents. If you have any interest in this, you can find lots of photos of this thing. And so basically, starting around the year zero, Codex is gradually replaced scrolls. And this is true all the way up into the 1400s. Books were written on parchment by hand using quills up to this time. And in 1407, at the peak of this craft, monks were producing things like this. This is a copy of the Bible, it's on display in England. It was handwritten by quill on parchment. This is in 1407. But then just 40 years ago, around 1450, there's 40 years later, around 1450, there's a dramatic change. Something big happens. And so around this time in Europe, there's a number of objects that are visible, they're under everyone's eye. A lot, you can see them everywhere you go. One is this, this is a wine press. Here's how it works, there's a handle up there and this is a screw and there's a lid attached to the bottom of the screw. So you can screw it up and put grapes in this barrel and then screw it down and it'll press the wine out. So the wine press, they're everywhere. Everyone understands how wine presses work. There's also coins. These are Roman coins, these are from much earlier. They're from like 79 coins. If you're making coins by hand, it's kind of a complicated process. Like the way you make a coin, these are, each side of a coin is an Audi, you can think of that. And so the way you make a coin is you have and any, a piece of metal that's, where you've carved in any of the front and a piece of metal where you've carved in any of the back and the way you make a coin is you get a blank, you heat it up, you put it between both those other pieces and then you can hit it with a hammer, bang. And then the soft internal metal deforms into the coin. They call that a die. So the any things are dies. The problem is if you're a ruler, if you're whoever that was, and you're making coins, you kind of want them all to look alike. And the dies wear out really fast because they get hit by the hammer every time, right? Every time you make a coin, you consume part of the sharpness of your die. And so the way they solve that problem so that they can make coins look similar all the time is they back it up, they recurse, right? They back it up one and they make a thing they call punch. And so what a punch is, it's a rod of metal where you carve the outer face of the coin on the end of the rod. And so you have a rod that's the front face and you'll have a rod that's the back face. And those rods are punches and they're used to make dies. And then the dies are used to make coins. And so that means as soon as your dies wear out, you can easily, the punches get used much less often than the dies. And that's how you can make a bunch of coins that look almost just alike. Everybody in Europe knows how coins are made. The other thing that is beginning to appear, it's been around for about the last 100 or 150 years in Europe. It came from China. It's paper. Now, relative to parchment, which is what they've been using in Europe, paper is terrible. It's fragile, it's weak. It doesn't look very long. You can't erase it a million times. But it has one real advantage over parchment. It's cheap. Now, it's not free. It's relatively expensive, but it's way less expensive than cheap. And so now in the 1430s in Mantz, Germany, these three things, which are commonly seen by everyone, they're under the eye of this man, Johannes Gutenberg. He's a blacksmith, a goldsmith, and ultimately he invents the modern printing press. He combines those three things into a grand idea that he has for an automatic writing machine, and he's obsessed with it. Building the automatic writing machine took most of his life. It left him in serious legal trouble. It drove him into bankruptcy. It made other people rich, and it changed the world. Now, it took him many, many years to make it work. There were a lot of little problems. He wanted to print books, but first he had to figure out, he shaved yaks for a while. The biggest problem he had was to figure out how to make this. This is what they call a sort. And when you look at it, it looks a lot like the thing I described as a coin punch. It's a rod with an Audi on one end, which here is whatever that letter is. And so you can imagine if you put ink on the end of it and turn it upside down and press it onto a sheet of paper, it would transfer that letter, which you can see down there. Now, but it's way trickier than a coin punch because the body of it has to be exactly right. Because you wanna put a whole bunch of them side by side and they have to fit exactly in the space. And so he needs a way to produce these easily and cheaply. And you're gonna need a lot of sorts. You need every letter and every font and every size, and they wear out quickly. And when you make new ones, they have to be exactly right. The letter on the end has to be right and the surrounding shape has to be right. So the printing press is not gonna work until Gutenberg figures out a way to reliably make sorts. And so he spent years and years and years working on this process and he barbed money the whole time. So he's significantly in debt by the time he figures out how to do this. On the left is a thing that a craftsman would carve. So if you want the letter H, they carve the letter H in the end of a block of metal and then they take the thing that's a die and this is softer metal. So they use this, they bang the end of it with a hammer and they make that shape. So they transfer the punch onto a die and then they use this thing that's called a hand mold. Now, I've looked at this picture a lot and I still don't really understand how it works. But I can tell you this, right? B and C are the exploded version of A and the punch, the die slides in the bottom when you put it together and somehow in the hollow part here, they basically put it together, put the die in the bottom and they pour molten lead in the top and out comes a letter, all right? So there's some secret about the internal shape of this that allows them to reliably produce sorts. And so once he, after many years of working on that, once he could finally produce sorts, he created a machine like this. You can see, here's the wine press and the sorts are sitting right there and there's a piece of paper up here, all right? So you could lay out, they could put all your sorts on a sheet like this, you could flip this paper over, you turn that crank and there you go. One side of one page of a book. And once they got the type set up, an experienced team could print more than 200 pages an hour. One day we were hand copying pages and the next we had a printing press. Gutenberg printed between 160 and 185 of those famous bibles. A quarter of them were on a vellum, here's one. And the rest were on paper, 140 to 165. This is 1300 pages long and it was completed sometime between March and November of 1455 right before Gutenberg went bankrupt and lost the rights to the printing press. And so at this point he disappears from the story but printing goes on. This invention dramatically speeds up the printing and all kinds of new works get to start being written. And so the primary cost of printing is now in the setting of types. Before you can print a page you have to collect all the type you need in every letter and every font and every size and then you have to assemble them correctly into the form. And that means you're gonna need a lot of type. Doors and drawers of type. And over the next 400 years, print shop patterns, some patterns emerged in print shops. Like it became common, like printers didn't need it as many of that special form of letter that started sentences and paragraphs. And so it became common to keep them in the upper cases. Okay, did you get that? Upper cases, yeah. And all the rest of the letters that there are many more of they kept in the lower cases and that's exactly how we got that terminology. When laying out a book, if you were gonna print a book you probably did not have enough type to set all the pages of the book. So printing a book is a matter of laying out the pages, laying out as many as you had type for printing as many sheets as you expected to have copies of the book and then tearing the type down or reusing it. And so you could easily find that you didn't have enough type, some piece of type that you needed to finish the last page. At that point, people were out of sorts because they were out of sorts, indeed. The problem, this problem of not having enough sorts. So imagine this, if you print a book, if you do that, if you set it up and tear it down and set it up and tear it down and then the book sells out, you have to do it all again. And that's a huge problem. It's really expensive. And so a guy named William Ged in what is it, 1425 came up with this process where you would make a, oh, sorry, you would make paper mache, a paper mache copy of a page of laid out type and then they would cast a solid sheet of lead in that sheet so that they could reprint that page without having to reset the type of. This is a stereotype. And that's exactly where the word comes from printing, right? It's the sense of something you might, a copy of a thing that you could reuse. It was really, but stereotyping wasn't cheap then as now. And so sometimes people would set like a, the Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne was a famous author by the time the Scarlet Letter came out and his publisher decided to do an astonishing runaway bestseller print run of 2,500 copies. And so they went through the book and they set up a page in time and they printed 2,500 copies. 2,500 copies, it sold out in three months. And then they did it all again. They let out all the pages and printed it again and they printed 3,000 copies the second time and that sold out in four months. And then finally the third time they laid out all the text, they stereotyped it so that they could just reprint new copies. So with the advent of printing press, the number of books printed in Europe exploded. Notice this scale is logarithmic and that top number is a billion. And every letter on every page of every one of these books was set by hand. And unlike books, newspapers have to be set up and torn down every day. And in the middle of the 19th century, there was no newspaper in the world that was more than eight pages long. And by the 1870s, many people were working on the problem of automating the setting of type. And by 1884, after eight years of work, this man, Uttmar Murgenthaler, has solved it. He's a watchmaker's apprentice from Germany and he moved to Washington, D.C., eventually from there to Baltimore and he made a machine that involves, revolves around something he simply calls a mat that was a matrix, but for short they called a mat. And you can see, you can sort of see like that's the letter W. This is sort of Gutenberg's, this is a die of some sort. You can tell by looking at it. All right, and notice that if you had a bunch of these, if you had a bunch of different mats and you stacked them side by side, you could pour metal into them and you would, you could pour metal into this and you would pull that out. A piece of metal that had all the letters printed on it. You can dynamically, now all of a sudden we can dynamically produce a line of type. Now you still need a lot of mats. You need uppercase and lowercase of every letter and every font and every size, but he made a machine that casts, print one line at a time and so the mats get cycled back in and reused. So you need, he's basically effectively creating sorts on the fly. So you don't need nearly as many mats as you used to. And so this mat, that matrix, is the central piece of this machine. Okay, let me explain how this works. And so this is the thing they call the magazine. All the mats are hung up here and rose. When you press a letter on this keyboard, they fall down through these shoots and they stack right in this space. They get transferred, the line that you taught gets transferred over and it gets stuck on the front of something they call the mold wheel. This melting pot is indeed a melting pot. It contains a liquid lead. And then there's a plunger that gets pressed down and then lead is forced through a little chute onto the matrix that we just saw. And then after that, there's a complicated mechanism to take those things back up and hook them back up. I have a few, this is a, this blows up the part. This is the mats falling out of the magazine and then you can see them stacked here. It says it is Dover there. This is what it looks like. They don't have, when they hit the space bar, there's no space mat. What they do is they put these things in that are shims, notice they're thicker at the bottom than they are at the top. And so when you do that, this is a line of type right here. There's a bar that you press up and the thing spreads out. That's how they justify lines of print. This is the mold wheel, the front of that, the part of the lead that I told you about there, there's a line of type on the front of it. And then here's a picture of the line of type is right here. This is the plunger going down. It's gonna push hot lead up onto the back of it to make type and that's what you get. All right, before I go on here, oh, one more thing, sorry. So this is the top bit of the matrix. And you can see that all these little teeth aren't just alike, so it's a binary code. And the way the mats get back to where in the right slot where they came from is they get dragged back up to the top of the machine and put on this thing and there's a screw that turns, that pushes them and eventually they come to a place where there's nothing to hold on to and they fall off. So that's how they get returned to the channel that they were on. Before I show you the video of it, for those of you who are from out of town, like we're here in the Carolina Theater, the Marriott is uphill from us. If you go to Old Chapel Hill Street, that's the street that's in front of the Marriott, if you, from where I'm standing, if I look at that direction, I'm looking at a line of type machine. There's one in the window of the Herald Sun, which is amazing. So if you get a chance when you leave here, if you wanna see one of these machines in real life, just walk around the block, go to this place in the next block up and you'll see it in the window. I did not know it was there until after I put together this talk and I was walking through downtown with Dan, I was like, oh my gosh. Okay, believe it or not, I have a demo. Sorry, that did not work. Let's now review the entire procedure at a glance. The manipulation of the keys releases the mats from in the magazine. They drop between the assembler entrance partition and are delivered to assembling elevators to form the line. The finished line is sent on to the caster. The mold and the metal pot advance and the plunger makes the cast. The pot and the mold withdraw. Then the first elevator rises to transfer the mats to the second elevator bar. At the same time, the slug, trimmed at the base and sides, is ejected into the galley. The mats go to the distributor. Moved by the helicoidal screws, they run along the length of the distributor bars so that with the procedure already noted, they fall into the respective channels of the magazine, ready for use in succeeding lines. Thomas Edison called the Linotype Machine the eighth wonder of the world. Book and magazine publishers bought Linotype Machines as fast as they could get their hands on them. Newspapers went from eight to 48 pages practically overnight. There was an explosion of printed material, suddenly we were setting type in lines per minute rather than minutes per line. I have some pictures. This is in New York Times in 1942. Here's the Dallas Morning News in 1943. Now this room is a workplace safety nightmare. It's incredibly loud. It's full of molten lead. It's, you know, they make it look like these machines are easy to operate, but actually they're super complicated. First of all, you can't see what you're typing and you have to be, the pacing is really important. It's very easy to make the machines jam or get the wrong thing. Linotype operate, this job at that point in time, this was one of the few jobs in America where they actively recruited deaf people. If you were gonna take this job, it was best that you already had hearing loss because you were gonna have it. And it was a real art. In some way, like in our craft, we teach each other and they felt as strongly, they were extremely proud of being able to do this job well. It was transformative and they taught each other a craft. Here's the Dallas Morning News. He's doing manual spell check back when you could still smoke at work. So scary. So once the lines of type came out of the, from the back, from the line, from the composing, I'm sorry, from the linotype room, they come up here to what they call makeup men. This guy, sorry, here. This. Yeah, so they come out of these little trays. The trays of type come out and then somebody has to take those trays and assemble a page of the newspaper. Notice he's reading upside down and backwards. That's the way they did it. I don't really understand why they didn't turn around at least look at it right side up but there was something about it that made them do it this way. This guy, you can almost not see it. The paper, it has to be really smooth on top so he is like swinging a mallet here. So he's like pounding on that sheet to get the type all set. I have a slight, so it's way easier. This is way easier than setting a whole page of loose type but it's still a fair amount of trouble. Headlines of course have, they're so big they're still set by hand. It's easy to drop a piece. Like there's a lot of physical dexterity involved here. Gotta fix that and then typos are a pain. So you can never complain about CSS again. Seriously. So the line of type was responsible for this explosion of printed context. Content, what it meant was we had a new transparency of information. It became possible for newspapers to print everything they could find out every day. It boosted the production of books and magazines the price of education went down, literacy skyrocket. Print became both affordable and ubiquitous and by 1928 the line of type machine was the primary type setting device in the world. Information is power and the line of type machine brought it to everyone. But just as with all these, you notice the acceleration here, right? As with all these other arcs of technology the line of types rain ended as suddenly as it began. In the mid 1960s, it was replaced by the computer. And I remember when this happened. I grew up in Parkersburg, West Virginia and my father worked for the daily paper and he was an observer. He was officially a member of the printers union and while he couldn't need operate one of those line of type machines he was actually a mechanic. His job was to go in there every day and keep the dirty, noisy, dangerous machines running. No matter what disaster occurred they put out a paper every day. Some days it wasn't very big. Some days he was really late coming home from work but when the newspaper was the only website in town they never let it go down. It was a matter of enormous pride to them to get out even if it was a one page paper they printed a paper every day. He wore black clothes to work because there was no amount of washing that would get all that grease and ink out of any other color clothing. And his hands were always nicked and deemed. He always had cuts and burn marks on his hand because he was working with that hot, hot dirty machines. We had that lava soap when I was a kid that has some abrasive in it and it was insufficient. His fingernails always had a ring of ink around him that he was always trying to get out. In my childhood in the 1960s he would sometimes come home with brass mats in his pockets. I actually had occasion to go see him in Fort Myers, Florida about three weeks ago and I got a box of pictures. And I'm sorry, I'm sick. I didn't think to bring it. When I got home and I did all the pictures there was a mat in that box. I have one of those mats at home now. But in this era, in my childhood in the 1960s this hot type is ending. It's being replaced by cold type which is what they call computers. He studied electronics. He took a correspondence electronics course and studied in a little room in our basement to become a mechanic for a new kind of composing machine. One where it was quiet and clean and where you could see what you typed without having to cast a hunk of lead. And as a kid I noticed this. I wasn't all that aware of it but I noticed it because when I was fascinated by his oscilloscope would seem like the coolest tool. I wanted one of my own. But also because I noticed one day when I was sitting in his lap after some period of time it passed that his hands were pink and clean when all those machines left. My father swam across the transition from hot to cold type and spent many more years in the newspaper business but as also had been true for monks and setters of movable type many other line of type machine operators did not. And so now finally against the backdrop of 5,000 years of history of the creation of content and the control of information it's time for me to tell your fortune. Embrace yourself because what I'm about to tell you is the cold hard truth and some of the bits especially the first parts are a little hard. Everything will change, everything. The first of all the biggest change is that you're gonna die and everyone you know will die. Your parents are gonna die, your siblings are gonna die and your kids are someday gonna die. Some will die in quiet peace after a long life well lived but others will not be so lucky and their ends will come in confusion and pain and with regrets. Others will die too soon before their own time of accident or terrible disease or by their own hands and they will leave you alone in grief and anger and guilt. And regardless of how they go you'll see them pass and as the generations in front of you disappear one by one you'll feel yourself taking giant steps forward in the mortality line. Someday you're gonna reach the head of that line. I know this to be your future because I'm a woman of a certain age and it is my past. These things will come to be. Next, okay that was the worst of it. Next your body's gonna fail you. Your eyes will weaken, you'll get to where you can't read street signs and unfamiliar locations at night and you'll get increasingly grateful for the little flashlight on your phone when you have to read a menu in a restaurant. There are reading glasses in your future. You'll probably have surgery on one or more joints. You'll get on first name basis with your endodontist and your orthopedic surgeon. You'll get low back trouble and develop a repetitive motion injury. Too much time sitting in that chair typing at your computer. Those chickens come home to roost. Ask me how I know this. Yes, all of these things have happened to me. Not only will your work change and your body change, not only will your, sorry, your family change and your body change, but your work will change. I got my first programming job in the spring of 1978, just three short months before the New York Times last set of newspaper using a line of type machine. Mosaic, the first web browser appeared 15 years later. It was released in O.1.A was released in June of 1993. Now 25 years after the introduction of the first web browser, the internet is at the center of our lives. We live inside this bubble, so it's hard to remember, but the job you have today appeared as suddenly as that of a line of type operator. In the 60s and 70s, when phototypes setting arrived, these machines became worthless overnight. Newspapers disposed of them by throwing them from second story windows into parking lots and having them called off for scrap. So that's your fortune. Does it involve an unexpected inheritance or a tall, dark stranger? Unfortunately, those are edge cases. This is your real fortune. This is the one you share in common with everyone in this room. You can think of it as the happy path of your life. And I admit it sounds bad, right? Death, decay and obsolescence. What's not to like? But the truth is in the arc of your life, this is the happy path. These are the things you can depend on. They're the abstraction. This is the metal layer that stands above all of the daily change. And if your life really were an application, you wouldn't ignore the inevitable. You'd get on it right now. You can see this comment. You would be writing code for these features today. Accepting the truth of this fortune makes it clear what's important. The MVPs are the only app that matters, our health, happiness, and the world we leave our children. And I want you to start working on this app right now. There's some little hanging fruit. Now I'm going to take advantage of my position up here and give you some advice. Happiness. Live as if you know you'll die. Do real things. Tell everyone you love them today. Your family may or may not reflect the composition of your family, but I can tell you, you should get a little dog. Health. You don't have to do anything quite this dangerous, but do something. It's a rear guard action. Believe me, I know. But go down fighting. Take care of yourself. Get an ergonomic keeper. Do that today. Get an ergonomic keeper. Stand up a little bit. Get some exercise. I do a lot of biking. Get a bike. Go to the gym. Take walks. Take breaks. Do something. You cannot make up tomorrow for not working out today. And believe me, I can promise you you're going to want your body later. So those are the parts of the app you can work on by yourself. But some parts of this app we can work on together. This community is important, and your place in it matters. And there are many ways to make a meaningful contribution. Showing up in small ways can make a really big difference. It's still morning in this new world of technology. And by standing up just a little taller, you can cast a very long shadow. So we can do things for ourselves, and we can do things for our tech community. We're also uniquely qualified to do things for others. We're bigger than the technology that brought us here. We're members of a tribe, and it's the tribe of information. And our lineage is scribes and typesetters and line-type operators, from scrolls to codexes, scriptoriums to composing rooms. We carry the mantle of the open sources of information. And I feel doubly a member of this tribe, since not only do I do this work, but I was raised by a man who came home with mats in his pockets and ink in his hands. My dad's now in his 80s, and until quite recently he worked four days a week. Two of them were at a rental price in a car, an enterprise rental car. Yes, I am terrified to say that he was the man who picked you up. And the other two days, the other two days he works, he volunteers at the food bank, where he does the books and finds lunch for folks who can't keep the electricity on and tries to make sure that people don't go hungry. But despite his efforts, they do. I would not presume to say that you have an obligation to something bigger than yourself, but he feels one, and I inherited that feeling from him. Your schools need help. Your neighborhoods need help. If you want, you can pitch in literally. Habitat for Humanity builds houses. I am not one bit religious, but I love this mission. We want to belong and we want to change the world. And Habitat lets you do both of these things while working with dangerous tools. Once, I kid you not, this is a true story. Once at Habitat Build, they let me drive the Bobcat. It could happen. Yeah, so if you're not the nail banging type, I can tell you from personal experience that Habitat's volunteer management software sucks. And I suspect it's because some poor person in that organization wrote it. And I suspect it's also true that there are many organizations like that, where non-technologists are trying to use technology to help solve some big social problem. They need our help. Everywhere I look, there's something that needs doing, and I can promise you there's a deep satisfaction in doing it. It's an axiom among bicyclists that either there's a headwind or you're having a good day. And I'm always tempted to claim a fast, wind-assisted ride as my own accomplishment, as if I really am that strong and earned it all myself. But I can't forget that if my doppelganger, if it was Sandy Me, we're out here on the same day in the same conditions, writing in the opposite direction, that she would work just as hard, but accomplish far less. Having looked at the past, we can predict the future. Change. And by an accident of timing, we stand at the vortex of that change. We're at the intersection of information and technology. Unlike many others, you are all lucky enough to have choices, and the things you choose now are creating the world that everyone will see next. I challenge you, choose something big. Thank you.