Dream, struggle, create, prevail. Be daring. Be brave. Be loving. Be compassionate. Be strong. Be brilliant. Be beautiful.

Sometimes you climb the mountain, and you fall and fail. Maybe there is a different path that will take you up. Sometimes a different mountain.

In 2001, the hard disk on my laptop crashed, and everything on it was lost. I'd been using the computer for two, almost three years, and had all my work on it - email, which was stored locally; photos; fragments of poems; presentations; sketches; ideas; love letters; everything. I lamented the loss to my friends and got lectured on doing backups.

If we are not given the chance to forget, we are also not given the chance to recover our memories, to alter them with time, perspective, and wisdom. Forgetting, we can be ourselves beyond what the past has told us we are; we can evolve. That is the possibility we want from the future.

Every place has a story - or a thousand stories. Findery brings places to life, be they where you stand or where you hope to go.

I learned most of what I knew about online communities on The Well, and it was a good place to learn. The group of people in Sausalito and Bolinas who'd gotten the Whole Earth Catalog off the ground - a bunch of boomer hippies, intellectuals and nerds - established the 'Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link', and showed us what online communities were.

The children of less effective, less competent parents will be more likely to adopt the customs and values of the peer group.

Trade sales are the bulk of exits, and there's no shame in that. Sometimes, it's exactly the right thing to do.

Vacations are good, and I come back energized, with the whiff of Hawaiian Tropic in the air and 2,000 messages in my Inbox.