Recently, I spent a Saturday selling tickets for the Rotary Clubs of Castle Rock 7th Annual Ducky Derby and Street Fest. The money raised through this family-oriented event is split between the Castle Rock Senior Center, and the Women's Crisis Center.

I was outside the local Safeway grocery store, which generously allowed us the opportunity to appeal to their foot traffic. (King Soopers has also provided this opportunity.) And in about two hours, I sold fifty tickets.

Some 12 years ago, I wrote a professional article that a lot of my colleagues ridiculed.

I was talking about email, then beginning to be hailed as a kind of perfect communication tool, both intimate and immediate.

"Mark my words," I wrote. "Coming tomorrow -- junk email."

OK, I got the name wrong. Today it's called "spam" (after the hilarious Monty Python sketch). But I nailed the idea.

Between 1982 and 1991, there flowered a golden age of software. This software was called, variously, "outline processors," or "outline editors," or, more recently, just "outliners."

Such programs have always fascinated me. Recently, I spent some twenty hours or so seeing what was still out there, and writing up my thoughts about what I found.

I entered the library field just as computers were really taking off. It was exciting.

Before computers, staff used to spent a staggering number of hours each day filing. We typed and filed the patron cards. Every book had a card. When people checked them out, we filed the cards by date.

And then, when an item went overdue, we pulled the item card and the patron card, typed up an overdue notice, and sent it out.