Today is Veterans' Day. Huge thanks to all who served, wartime or peacetime, and my thoughts and prayers with the families of those who gave their lives serving. This year, it seems particularly somber, considering what happened last Thursday at Fort Hood.

I remember several years ago getting into a discussion with one of my classes - they were arguing whether this day was Memorial Day or Veterans' Day. I said it was Veterans' Day, and then said, "The eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month." Surprisingly (to me) no one in the class either knew (or remembered) hearing that before - that Veteran's Day (formerly known as Armistice Day) marked the official end of hostilities of World War I (formerly known as The War To End All Wars).

I suppose part of the fact that I know that is that I am old enough - and my forebears had their children late enough in life - that I had a grandfather who served in WWI (even if he never saw action - he was an experimental pilot in the earliest incarnation of the Army Air Corps, and actually did much of his training in Texas) and a grandmother who talked about a brother who had served (he had been in France and Belgium, in the infantry). And also having had really good history classes in school. (Mr. Haas, where ever you are now, I thank you for 8th grade American History). And being a history geek.

But I think it's important to know stuff like this, partly out of the sense of honoring those who went before, but also - for me, it's kind of like the liturgical year stuff at church - it gives me a sense that even though I may at times believe we are all hurtling towards our doom, there are still things that are constant and that can be held on to. It gives me a sense of stability, in an odd way.

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I finished "The Victorian Internet" last night. I stand by my earlier comment that it is a better and more interesting book than "Jacquard's Web," for one thing, I think it is "tighter" - there are fewer pointless excursions onto other topics. I also like how Standage (the author, apparently he has also written for Wired magazine) draws parallels between the telegraph's impact on society and technology with the Internet's. The final chapter of the book - where he wraps it all up and brings things to the "present day," is particularly good.

All along he had been talking about how the telegraph connected places, made news travel faster - how it changed the expectation of what was "news" and what was "timely."

And I think now - again with the being older than the students I interact with - how I grew up in an era before 24 hour news channels on the television. How a "breaking news," where they broke into regular programming was a BIG deal (I remember learning of Reagan getting shot that way). It was reserved for things like heads of state dying or major tragedies. Now, some of the news channels use "Breaking News" alerts for really rather trivial things at times, and I admit I still have that old ghost of the "Oh no, what's happened now?" reaction come up every time I see one - and feel distinctly annoyed when it's, like, "Jon and Kate Gosselin have decided to split up" or some other thing that is not geo-politically meaningful). But now, when something happens, where do most of us go? The internet. One thing I remember as being striking about September 11, 2001, was how the sites bogged down, how I kept hitting "refresh" to see if there was any new information, and how so many of the sites were just unavailable. (Actually, a lot of the information came via a bulletin board I was a part of at that time.)

Standage also discusses how the telegraph led to people falling in love long distance (in some cases, the operators - at many locations, women were hired as telegraph operators as well as men). And there were apparently instances of "alienation of affection" that involved the telegraph. And there were swindles, just like there are on the Internet today.

He also discusses - and some of this went over my head a bit, being not all that clear on the technical details of connectivity - but apparently there are some remnants of old telegraph protocol, or some of the old limitations, that still exist (or existed, as of the time the book was written) in modem protocols.

Oh, and another thing: the "leet" vs. "n00b" division existed in the days of telegraphy:

"Highly skilled telegraphers in city offices would lose their temper when forced to deal with hopelessly inept operators in remote villages; the same phenomenon was widespread on the Internet when the masses first surged on-line in the early 1990s, unaware of customs and traditions that had held sway on the Internet for years, and capable of what, to experienced users, seemed unbelievable stupidity, gullibility, and impoliteness."

(Heh. I can imagine an old time telegraph operator cursing and saying, "Why must he key in all capital letters? Does he not know that is the equivalent of shouting?")

(Yes, yes, I know: there was no capital and lowercase in Morse Code. But it's the cleverest joke I can come up with)

I'm a little sad that the book is apparently OOP; it's really interesting. (Perhaps Standage is preparing an updated version). I learned a lot about telegraphy and it also made me think about our expectations as a culture on how fast information should move and how "free" it should be.