There I was, sitting at the computer having a video conference across Skype with a guy in Nicaragua. He’s the designer on the college magazine I edit, a former college professor who picked up and moved to Central America because the surfing’s good and it gets him farther away from me. We Skype a lot. If you don’t know, Skype isn’t a kind of fish, but a program that lets two people video chat across the Internet. It’s almost as good as being in the same room, only I can’t reach across the desk, grab his shirt and scream, “Where are my pages?” (I miss that part.) So there we were, chatting it up like I’ve done dozens of times before when the grandest of revelations occurred to me: “Holy time machines, I’m in the future!”