Of all the places I’ve worked, the one I’m most proud of was Sapient, one of the first and most successful Internet consulting agencies of the Dot-Com Bubble.

And probably the thing that I’m most proud of about Sapient is the list of amazing and noteworthy clients I got to work with, including National Geographic Magazine, Verizon, JP Morgan, Staples, Vanguard, WorldCom, Wells Fargo, Cardinal Health, and many others.

But one client and project will always stand out in my memory: HomeLink and OfficeLink, BankBoston’s first Web-based banking sites for individual consumers and small businesses respectively. And because of that, I’ve retained a not-small pile of memorabilia.

Why does that client stand out? Because I was already a HomeLink user! I had been using the first iteration of HomeLi »more

Recently, in my post about my new computer keyboard, I mentioned that punch cards were still in use when I was in college. Did you question that story? Well, lookee here!

Now, I didn’t say they were common. There was only one card punch and one card reader in the university computer center, and by the time I graduated, even these peripherals had been removed. You didn’t see them very often, but every so often you’d see an old card deck lying around, possibly abandoned.

That’s how I came across a box of cards labeled “Egypt Dictionary” and adopted it.

Why bother? For one thing, they were a disappearing rarity. But I’d also grown accustomed to using them for jotting down lists and notes, kind of like then-recently-invented Post-It notes, only free, a more usable size, and more robust t »more

Imagine a Smurf. Little blue guys in white pants and cap singing “La la, la-la la la…”

Now imagine a disease-infected Smurf with black skin, clenched fists, and angry red eyes, whose only actions are hopping around, shouting “Gnap!”, and biting other Smurfs on the ass (which then turns the victim into another Black Smurf).

That was actually the premise for a 1963 comic by the Smurfs’ creator, Peyo. In it, all the Smurfs wound up turning into Black Smurfs – even Papa Smurf, who was working on an antidote – but the world is saved when the Black Smurfs cause Papa Smurf’s lab to explode, scattering his in-progress antidote into the air, where it does its job of resetting the plot.

That story was also adapted in the 1981 Hanna-Barbera Smurfs cartoon, although they chose to depict the infected »more

Here I was, all set to post my first of these new “Memorabilia” blogpos, when this happened:

See that big black gaping hole in the toecap of my pine green Chuck Taylor sneakers? Yep, they bit it. Now let’s talk about why I care about a dirty old pair of Chucks…

Out of all the pairs of Chucks I’ve had, this was my only real custom order. Back in 2011, I used Converse’s custom sneaker configurator to build this pair up from scratch, with gunmetal grey stitching and eyelets, green highlight stripes, and a gingham patterned inner lining. But the topper was the silver embroidered “T2SP” on both outer heel panels.

The significance? It’s a reference to an old fable about a monarch who commissions a ring to make him happy in times of sadness. The ring is inscribed with the phrase “This too shal »more