This morning’s LA Times had the obituary for N!xau, the bushman who starred in The Gods Must Be Crazy. I would point you to it, but you have to be logged into the LA Times site to read it. Which is a problem, because I just switched computers and the new one doesn’t have my LA Times password cookie. My spreadsheet of usernames and passwords is on the old machine, and I haven’t bothered to move Excel over yet.
The spreadsheet has about 50 different usernames — because the one I want is usually already taken, or I logged in years ago and forgot I’d done it — and 50 different passwords, because most sites make you change your password periodically and have different requirements for what constitutes an acceptable one. And I have to worry about writing about it here, in case a hacker can break in and steal the file.
I also heard a story from a friend about someone who’d left all his keys in someone else’s car, so the other person had to drive back several hundred miles to return them, because the first guy was locked out of his car, his house, and his office.
We’re talking about technology that’s more than 1,000 years old here — keys and passwords. Probably more like 2,000 years. What are we doing with all this new technology — online video chat, full-length motion pictures on a $3,000 desktop, genetic engineering of tomatoes from fish genes — but we can’t find a good way to prove that “I” am “me” to satisfy a doorknob, let alone a website?
N!xau, by the way, took his first wages — $300 — and let them blow away in the wind. He didn’t know what paper money was for.
The Bushmen don’t have keys, or websites, or intellectual property disputes over CDs they don’t have players for.
(I was interrupted mid-post by questions about converting spreadsheets from dBase and Lotus. Which is more or less the point.)