This morning, I got up bright and early and drove to the Boulder Compound.

There, I was fed sweet rolls fresh out of the oven. Zan Lynx showed up, and we commenced with carrying furniture and boxes out to the U-Haul van.

As far as assisting people moving goes, this one was relatively mild. (I compare it mainly with previous occassions helping the Logan family, as well as my trip to help $mentor[0] last fall.)

Afterward, Jaeger took us out to Q'Doba for yummy burritos.

Based on a discussion with Zan Lynx today, I was inspired to make Argo a freenet node. Lo and behold, when I got back here to check slashdot, the latest story was about just that. I took this as a sign, and immediately downloaded it.

A few minutes of setup (since I already had the latest jdk), and I was up and running.

All I can say so far is, 1) It's really slow, at least right now (docs say it gets better if you run it for a while), and 2) It reminds me a LOT of the world wide web circa 1995. Why do I say this?

The pages take forever to load, just like they did over a modem. The content, at least on pages I've visited so far, consist of fairly bare-bones html with a few small images here and there. Stuff is predominately seems to be written by the tech-savvy idealists, for the tech-savvy idealists, particularly those with a free speech obsession (which I tend to share).

Also, the mystery of it. Looking at the location bar and seeing something like http://127.0.0.1:8888/SSK@rBjVda8pC-Kq04jUurIAb8IzAGcPAgM/TFE//thelist.html at every page I visit, reminds me of the feeling I got back when I first used a web browser, and had no idea what was going on.

Since the point of the medium is, after all, to be anonymous, there's no way to even "feel" you know the source of whatever you're looking at. No names on most of the sites. No domain. No human-readable address. Just a big, unknown void that speaks of freedom, as-of-yet undiscovered technical wonders, forbidden treasure (i.e. pirated software, music, movies, and porn), and God knows what else.

The RIAA's worst nightmare. I love it.

I think I might publish some content of my own on freenet. Maybe post a parallel Bitscape's Lounge up there (or write and publish different content under some other truly anonymous name for extra adventure). The possibilities are endless. Yay.