So for reasons known but to God, some Internet rando just favorited a picture in my Flickr stream from 2007. It’s from a then-current meme about what we carry in our pockets. Click thru, because the picture is annotated, but here’s a smaller version:

I’m amused at what’s changed, and also at what’s the same.

• I still carry a Swiss Army Knife, but it’s a smaller model, since I never have to take computers apart anymore.
• I still carry that coupon.
• After years off the road, I quit carrying a Bluetooth headset — until this year, when I bought some Airpods, which are kind of crap for real listening but GREAT for phone conversations and online meetings. What interesting is that the Plantronics in the picture also did the “case is also a charger” thing that the Airpods do, if I remember correctly.
• Same ring. The annotation on the ring notes our “days married” count at the time, which was 662. It’s now 1,293.
• There’s always a book.
• The current flashlight is MUCH SMALLER, much brighter, and much cheaper.
• I never carry a USB drive anymore, probably because online storage is more viable with better bandwidth, and also because our phones are so much better.
• Same money clip. Different money, though.
• I still HAVE that watch, but for the last 2 years I’ve been wearing an Apple Watch pretty much exclusively. I got a series 1 watch in the spring of 2016, to support training for a half marathon I was doing that fall, and the overall utility was so great I wore it pretty much all the time. When the S3 was introduced last year, with real waterproofing and on-board cell, I upgraded.
• Yup, still notebook nerd, and I still use a Vanishing Point, though several years ago my brother gave me a nicer iteration of that pen.
• I never leave the house, so keys are in the hallway.
• No more contacts. I stopped being able to tolerate them several years ago; oh well.
• It’s more about Burt’s Bees now than Carmex, but life goes on.
• That Microsoft/HTC phone lasted like 6 months. Pretty soon, I was too frustrated with how unremittingly DUMB it was about so, so many things. For one thing, you needed a 3rd party mail client for IMAP, which is hilariously stupid. For another, it would do astoundingly silly things like continue to refresh web pages with the display off, so if you were reading CNN and put it back in your pocket, odds are the phone would be dead when you tried to use it later. I replaced it with a first-gen iPhone, and I’ve been on iOS ever since (OG -> 3GS -> 4 -> 5 -> 6 -> 6S -> 8).
• The wallet finally gave up the ghost; current version is a Saddleback I’ve had for many years now.