From Mark Pilgrim, a parable about the way technology has streamlined our lives.

Back in the Stone Age, you took a roll of pictures (24, maybe 36), trudged down to the local photo development shop (or, more recently, supermarket), stuffed your film in an envelope, filled out a form, dropped it in a box, trudged back, picked them up, and stuck them on your refrigerator. Total wait time: 3 days.

In the new-and-improved Digital Age, you can take as many as 200 pictures at a time in your spiffy $400 digital camera, download them to your hard drive, stay up until 3 AM writing custom scripts to organize them and auto-create thumbnail galleries and HTML pages for them, buy a domain name, install weblogging software, and upload them to your web site. Total wait time: 7 months.