I went to the Phillies-Dodgers game last night. For whatever marketing reason, the Phillies were observing Retro Night - a flash back to the '70's. We had 6th-row tickets along the third base side. The original Blue Notes ("If You Don't Know Me By Now") put on a pre-game concert about 20 feet in front of us. (Harold Melvin himself had died in 1997.)

Between every inning, the scoreboards played clips and music from the '70's. Between the third and fourth innings, they showed clips of Larry Bowa playing - a scrappy and overconfident shortstop who broke into the Phillies in 1970. Today, Larry Bowa coaches third base for the Dodgers. He was standing right in front of me throughout his two minutes of scoreboard tribute. It's not clear that he knew it was coming.

From the angle I had, I could see both Bowa and the scoreboard simultaneously. Bowa's eyes were peeled on the scoreboard, though I doubt he was aware I was watching him. I imagined that - though he had to watch - it must have been painful. He's a 62-year old boy who never had to grow up. He's stayed active in baseball - the game he loves. But I can't imagine that he wasn't in pain as he watched 30-year old film of him doing things he'll never be able to do again.

Bowa's relationship with the fans has ranged somewhere between passionate love, and passionate hate. When the scoreboard clips finished, the sections around me provided a warm ovation. He was a key player in the team's only championship in their 125-year history. For the moment, his shaky tenures as manager; his mouthing off at the fans; the Dodger jersey he was wearing - none of that mattered.

On the whole, Philadelphia fans appreciate Larry Bowa's contributions to the team's history. When the clip finished, Bowa tipped his cap.

I began my stay-at-home consulting practice in 1991 when a home computer meant I no longer needed a corporate mainframe system for data storage and mass computations. And what a wonder it was: A state-of-the-art 486 - during a time when companies were upgrading their 286's for 386's - with an 80 megabyte hard drive, and 25 megahertz of processing speed. In 1991, 80 megabytes was synonymous with Infinite. For at my former job, I was restricted to 1.4-megabyte floppy disks for storage. In short, my new computer was bragging material, even though I'd never function with it today.

At the time, the company I resigned from was boasting storage capacity of a gigabyte - a new term to me, but enough storage capacity to store every computer file ever produced by the company's then 55-year history.

Yesterday, I upgraded my 160-gigabyte backup hard drive for a 2-terabyte drive. At the time I bought it, it was state-of-the-art, though I'm sure that by the time I plugged it in, a 4-terabyte model was on some shelves somewhere. I now have 25,000 times the storage capacity that I regarded as "infinite" just 17 years ago - that is 2-trillion items of data.

And I know that one day, that will prove inadequate. So that compels me to learn the term for a quadrillion, "petabyte;" a quintillion, "exabyte;" and while I am at it, why stop there?

The prefixes Tera-, Peta-, and Exa- are perversions of 4, 5, and 6 in Greek (Tetra, Penta, and Hexa). The next two prefixes have the interesting twist of being further prefixed with a letter starting with Z, and proceeding in reverse order:

Zetta - Z + perversion of "Septa" for 7.
Yotta - Y + perversion of "Octa" for 8.

The sun emits 380 Yottawatts of power - 380 septillion watts.

So far, all these terms can be found in dictionary.com. The prefix Yotta- was named in 2006. Beyond that is pure speculation - the International System of Units has not yet named them. Presumably, the next prefix will start with an X, the next letter in line after Z and Y. And it will follow with a perversion of "enna" for 9. (An "inning" is one-ninth of a game.) I have no doubt you can find them - they just are not official. Nor are they necessary.

Yet.

It may be one day possible that the number of items of stored computer data exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.

As I posted earlier, in Maryland, you can renew your drivers license by mail. As my license comes up for renewal in August, I sent them the paperwork on June 6. The license arrived on June 24.

I suppose I should be happy that they didn't make me guess if it would arrive on time. But there was a hook: It came with a notice that my existing license had expired immediately.

Now, from June 22 to 28, I was renting a car in Alaska. What if I had gotten pulled over - for any reason - from the 25th to the 28th?

I checked with our great MVA. Had I gotten pulled over later than the 26th, and had the Alaska police checked, then they would have reported the license I presented as "expired," notwithstanding the August expiration date on the license itself.

Somehow, I feel like I dodged one.