A sure sign that a Bostonian is successful:

Another Bostonian comes along to say he sucks because he isn’t as good as he used to be.

Yup, the site linked to above is called Angry Bostonian. No relation to us. For the record, we were angrier long before he was. Ten Angry Men launched in 2001, and has been running more or less since. (Here's our site circa 2001. While you're at it, just for kicks here's a circa 2001 item in which we took a look ahead to the year 2005. Back in the year 2001, the 2005 seemed so far away. It's easy to forget we live in the future.)

So why did we call ourselves the Ten Angry Men, and not Five, or even Three? Because back then, it took Ten men to run a web site, and the angrier the better. Nothing powers a team of anonymous posters like spite, bile and unredressed grievances.

And boy, were we angry. With good reason. Back in our day, we didn’t have your fancy automated Blogger.com or your Movable Type software, with your Youtube embedded videos and your Flckr online photo galleries. We had to hand code everything in HTML, and if we were in a hurry we used software like Hot Dog Pro and Claris Home Page, and we liked it, because we didn’t know any better. Youtube videos? Please. We swapped links to Simpsons sound boards, dancing babies, and grainy screen captures from the first season of South Park painstakingly obtained by manually recording the show on our analog cable systems then pausing the VCR in playback modes and connecting a computer motherboard to the back of the VCR (making sure the White Audio In connected to the White Audio Out and the red Video In connected to the Red Video Out) then playing back the tape onto our PC and dumping the recorded image into our Paint Shop Pro freeware downloaded from Shareware.com, and editing it once more before converting to a Compuserve .GIF image in our L View Pro image editor grabbed from the New Stuff page on the PC Computing Magazine web site.

Sigh. We'll step back while the rest of the Ten peruse the old site. Right now, a handful of 34 year-olds scattered across this nation are growing weepy eyed over their lost youth and the halcyon days before 2001.

As someone way more talented than us put it a few years ago, “I'm nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday.”