One cool thing about writing stuff on this website is that most of the past 2 years of my life has been pretty well archived.  Not archived like a series of events, but archived more like a collection of thoughts.  The things I've written about have been more along the lines of "what's going on in my head" as opposed to "what I did yesterday".  But hey, whatever floats your boat. 

The first time I did something like this was when I was in college, but it was before the ease of online publishing.  I wrote all my thoughts and opinions, unfiltered and unedited, in a password-protected Word document.  It was great to be able to get stuff out of my head, and it was also interesting to look back on it to see what I was thinking the previous day, month, or year.  As of this moment, I don't remember the passwords for these password-protected documents, so I have no idea what I used to think.  This troubles me, but maybe I'll figure something out eventually.  (Update [2006-11-14 11:41am]:  I was using a trial version of some password recovering software, and the program was able to guess the password in just a few seconds, reminding me that the password was only a few characters long and that the password was the same for each of the documents.  Now I have access to all my memories!)

My biggest regret about this whole thing is that I didn't start it sooner.  It would be really cool to find out what I used to think when I was 16.  Or 11.  Or 7.  It would probably be naive and embarrassing, but that's how things go.  So my word of advice to anyone reading this:  Keep a record.  Call it a diary, a journal, a blog, whatever.  The name doesn't matter.  Just keep a record.  Write down what you do, what you think, what you like, what you hate, who you meet.  It's unbelievably beneficial.