Every house on the street I grew up on had a front porch and 4 to 6 people living in it. Everyone knew everyone and we did everything together. There was no organized sports; if you wanted to play you just went in the middle of the street and in 5 minutes there were 10 other kids. If you wanted to take a shortcut, you just cut though people's yards; no one had a fence.

Every one of my parent's 14 siblings and my 32 first cousins lived within 10 miles. We all saw each other at least once per week.

Our mailman cut our hair, our dry cleaner picked up and delivered, our principal was also manager of the local swimming pool, and we worshipped in our neighbor's basement.

We knew the names of every police officer, fireman, cashier, clerk, waitress, gardner, and handyman in our neighborhood. If you ever needed anything, someone knew someone else who could help you. We didn't have google, cell phones, or cable TV; we had lots of other people in our lives all the time.

In college, I lived with 35 others in a fraternity house. We didn't do a whole lot of planning. There was always someone around to do stuff with.

Today, I don't know the name of a single neighbor. I don't remember the last time I lived in a house without a fence in back or with a porch in front. My nearest relative lives 1000 miles away. I know the names of exactly 2 waitresses; guess where I eat out all the time?

Loneliness probably has more to do with the proximity of people in your life than all these other "factors".

I don't know when things changed, but they sure have. Anyone with experiences similar to mine?

HP's getting a hell of a deal here. They're now a major player in the mobile devices market, overnight.

Palm has current relationships with the three biggest American cell carriers, plus channels in Canada, France, Germany, UK, and Mexico. Palm also has an extensive patent portfolio, many of which Apple is infringing upon.

However, the real prize is WebOS. I just got back from Palm's Developer Day, and their technology stack for their next OS version is pretty damn neat. It's a high performance event-driven javascript architecture on the back end, with WebKit on the front, all programmed through a Rails-ish MVC model. As a web developer, it looks shockingly easy to program for.

Of course, if you want to program the phone in raw C/C++ and SDL, you can do that too. It's incredibly flexible.

What Palm has been lacking is cash and time. The WebOS development stack won't be fully built out until Fall, and they haven't had the resources to push new phone models out as quickly as they need. This deal gives Palm much needed juice, and gives HP all the things they need to go head-to-head with Apple.

If HP is smart, they'll start tossing WebOS on tablets as soon as they can. I'd buy an HP slate with WebOS in a heartbeat.

Headline is inaccurate, it's 93% of subprime-backed mortgage securities.

Turnover rate: a FANTASTIC question to ask at your next job interview. Keep them on their toes.

We love the people who ask hard questions. If the person interviewing you doesn't: don't work there.

Thanks for that post.

I am really not liking the whole emphasize-iphoneOS-over everything-else direction of apple recently. I like OSX a lot. I really hope they return to giving it the attention it deserves soon.