My son is an Internet Gypsy, that is to say he wanders from friends house to friends house every night looking for an on-line fix. He hasn’t slept at home in weeks. It would not be too far a stretch to claim he actually lives on the internet and visits our world during downtime. Like many of the once called ‘middle-class’, I have felt the crush of the second great depression. Through manning reductions and cuts in pay, my family has lost an entire mortgage payment in monthly income. Due to this we have had to cut all non essentials, so no more Xbox-Live, no more Netflix, Cable, land line phones or internet. For a kid that is used to playing two MMO’s at the same time, while laying down suppressive fire in a live FPS and all the while keeping a running dialog on several open chat windows it’s tantamount to the zombie apocalypse.

My earliest memories of Joshua’s computer wanderings go far back to his early years, perhaps at as early an age as four (for those uber geeks who may have caught it, yes indeed Joshua was named after the computer in WarGames). Joshua loved wandering through my computers hard drive using Norton Commander, which I had setup with some hotkeys to allow the kids to play edutainment games. Joshua especially liked Reader Rabbit, but was never content to limit his explorations to those offered by the menus. Josh loved to get the women of the house to freak out by opening Daddy’s porn. So after several hysterical calls (All beginning with the phrase, “Do you know what your son just did!”) I would relocate the offensive images to less accessible places. That never seemed to slow Joshua down, almost as fast as I moved them he would track them down and display them for the world to see. Thinking I was smarter then this child whose sole experience with modern computing was chasing letters with an EGA rabbit, I used the zip commands of good ole Norton Commander to archive the files (we used Gif’s back then) into abstractly named lumps. Did that stop Joshua? Not in the slightest. Needless to say, Dads porn collection went offline after that.

So, wherever you are tonight Joshua. We miss you! Be safe, and watch out for campers.