One of the odd perks of getting old is that one can look back to the distant past and wonder with cold detachment just who the hell we were. As a kid I was obsessed with cryptography and secret messages. I even halfheartedly tried to create a language that only my friends and I would understand. I wanted to build a robot. I also wanted to live in a desert island and made endless plans in my head on how I would run my life on it.