2021 - Click here

It is 2021.

I blog once a year. Here is this year's edition.

A new year is an opportunity to think back on the previous year for lots of people. Not necessarily for me.
I'm thinking back to 25 years ago. I was in Sackville, New Brunswick at the time. Spending New Years by myself because the visa I needed for visiting my family was not approved by some bureocrat.
I could not travel, while pretty much everyone else I knew could.
Being all alone for Christmass and New Years has its advantages. One of them is the opportunity to think without distractions. To pass the time I started writing a computer game, or rather something that looked like a computer game.
There was only one button in the middle of the screen saying "To learn the meaning of life click here", which I had programmed to move away at random as soon as the computer mouse hovered close to it. It was a button that was impossible to click.
It went quasi-viral, people would send it around as an email attachment and in those days they were not that afraid to click on an attachment. It was good fun seeing my friends try to "play" my game. Some were really determined to find the meaning of life by chasing that button at every corner of the computer screen.

Now, 25 years later I've figured it out.

Life is just information that is trying to survive and thrive in a fragile biological body. It is not the way our bodies look that make us different, but the different information our bodies hold and their ability to acquire, process and retain new information.
Most of us could not travel this past year without accepting some high risks. For me it was the first year since 25 years ago I spent every single day within a 200 km radius of my main residence. It was a similar setting for doing some thinking / information processing. And I've been thinking back to 25 years ago.
I wish you all have retained some fun new information through your biological CPU and into your biological memory unit in this past year.
Happy inserting a new number into it.
2021.
I hope I will add some new information into my biological storage this year that is also fun to keep and I wish the same to you.

e.