“I don’t think it’s going to happen today, Madeleine.  I’m meeting a friend in town for lunch.”

The average computer user, even those fairly knowledgeable about their computer, contemplates their computer as much more than a tool for browsing the web, updating various digital music players (iPod, Zune, Creative...etc), playing games, keeping various documents (various media, text, spread sheets, power points...etc) or communicating with friends and family. Even as one ascends up computer literary hierarchy and associated knowledge base people are still prone to miss innovative computing solutions that they may wish to either participate in or help design. Although there are a myriad of options available none of them are both as useful and interesting, in my honest opinion, as volunteer computing.

Alas we have become a culture that no longer finds great value in history. The punch-line retort of a teenager speaking with parents about fashion: “that was oh so five minutes ago” seems to be the credo of many today. We have become a civilization of people who live in the here and the now; anything more distant than the immediate past or the very near future seems to be far too exhausting to contemplate.