I'm surprised Claudia Azula Altucher hasn't divorced me yet. I'm surprised that she decided to date me to begin with.

I was a separated, but married, man. I had 2 kids. I had the IRS freezing my assets on a regular basis.

The bank was going to take the house my kids lived in. I had no job. I had no prospects. I had no friends. I got drunk every night.

Even a dating service rejected me. Eharmony, after making me fill out a form for an hour, said that "Separated" people are mostly losers so they refused to let me log in.

And I kept dating women who kept saying, "It better be ok with you that I date other guys." I didn't like that.

For some people that's fine. For me it wasn't fine but everyone was making me feel like I was crazy.

What happened to the world while I was gone?

Every day I always drive her crazy. I say, "I've run out of things to write about".

And, as she put it, "there's no answer. I have to slowly back away while he stares at me."

I'm always involved in lots of new projects. She says, "take a rest" and I say I will and then I take on a new project.

[She just walked by me. I told her, "I can't figure out what to write about", as a joke. And she asked, "Well, what happened when you went outside for coffee?" So I appreciate her trying.]

I think it's very hard to be married. I'm sort of sick of her right now.

We just spent five straight weeks working together on projects. I think we spent every moment together.

Maybe she is sick of me also.

We wrote a book. We went to London to give talk. We shot a bunch of videos this week that she's editing for me. She's translating "Choose Yourself" into Spanish. And it doesn't end. We do 5 podcasts a week together.

I'm sick of me when I read the above list.

I'll admit I forgot to get her an anniversary present. I hope she forgot to get me one as well. Then we'd be even.

But every morning I make her laugh. I like to make her laugh because she laughs not only with her mouth but with her leg. It goes up and down like a horse.

I make a joke with the sole purpose of watching her entire body contort. Sometimes she can't even stand and falls to the ground.

Then I laugh AT her.

One thing I know: the most important decision I ever made in my life is marrying her.

I was about to die when I met her. Everything in my life was upside down. The people, my health, I was angry all the time. I was scared. I was depressed. Doctors would give me horse tranquilizers just so I could sleep.

I figured out the exact technique to kill myself as painlessly as possible. I was going to do it.

I just wrote it down here but realized it's so easy I don't want people to try it. So I erased it.

Then back so long ago, I saw Claudia online. I asked her where she was from. She said, "Buenos Aires". I said, "Oh! I never been to Brazil before."

Somehow after that mistake she stuck with me. It's like I filtered out all the people who would assume I was an idiot (they would probably be right).

Then I wanted to have dinner with her to maybe get her drunk and have sex with her.

But she said no. "Tea". I said "Dinner". She said "tea". And only "one hour".

And then we took a walk. Then the next date we took another walk. A really long one because I was afraid to kiss her.

Then she went to buy one of my books. Because I went on a signing rampage all over NYC six months earlier and nobody had bought my books, the particular book she opened up of mine in a random bookstore said, "To Whoever Buys This Book, I Love You. - James Altucher".

She thought that was a sign from God. She checked the other books (they were all unsold and still are) and none of them had that. I remember signing that particular book.

My youngest, Mollie, who was only 7 then, looked at me when I had signed it six months earlier and said, "Daddy! What are you doing?" And I told Mollie, "I love whoever reads this book."

But it was enough. Because Claudia believes in miracles, she fell in love with me.

You breathe in the energy of the people around you. Claudia has her problems (a LOT of them) but when I breathe in her energy, I live another day.

Then I wanted to make a comic book. So I scripted out when I met her and someone drew it.

They drew her prettier than she is in real life. But that's ok. She's very beautiful even when she's not a cartoon.

In real life I like looking at her. I recorded her once when she was snoring and it sounded pig-like but I love listening to it even though she hates it.

She screamed at me when she heard the recording. I said, "but I recorded it for your health". She didn't believe me.

I made her laugh this morning. That makes me happy. I hope I do it every morning.

She will kick like a dying horse, and laugh and fall, and snore like a pig, and back away from me when I glare at the screen , but today I know I will live another day.

Technology changes far slower than we usually think it does.

In fact, a pretty-good technology that achieves widespread acceptance has a way of sticking around for years, even decades. Just look at how many people still listen to AM radio, buy CDs at concerts, or drive cars with internal combustion engines and four wheels.

Or, as Twilio co-founder and CEO Jeff Lawson told me in last week’s “What to Think” podcast, look at the way telephone technology has evolved over the past century and a half. Yes, we’ve added some pretty snazzy new features, like cellular data and VoIP calling. But the underlying infrastructure is, in some ways, much the same. Your fancy iPhone still has a touch-pad dialer for connecting you to the telephone network, and that dialer is basically a digital representation of something that has existed since the 1960s.

The persistence of old-but-acceptable technology has some big implications for the future of the Web. After all, the Web is hardly cutting-edge tech. The basic protocol on which the Internet is based, TCP/IP, is over 40 years old. HTTP, the hypertext transfer protocol used to move Web data from server to browser, is about 25 years old. (Yes, both of these protocols have been revised since their early days, but their basic principles are intact.) JavaScript and Adobe Flash, God help us, are both about 20 years old.

So if you’re waiting for a transformative change in how we consume information online, you could be waiting a long time. The Web may be a rickety stack of outdated protocols and standards, but it works, mostly, and it’s free and open to all comers. That, for the past few decades, has proven to be a pretty winning combination.

But will it change as we shift to a mobile-centric era? There are a lot of observers who say that apps are winning out over the mobile Web, and that Web-based standards like HTML5 will become less relevant as we move to proprietary systems for delivering information and communication: Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, WeChat, Vine.

I’m not so sure. I think there are signs that people are becoming frustrated with the limits imposed by these “walled garden” apps. Yes, Facebook’s Instant Articles might be much faster and allow more elegant presentations than a Web page. But how many publishers have actually published on the Facebook platform since its ballyhooed debut two months ago?

I was thinking about this while reading a post by Maciej Cegłowski called Web Design: The First 100 Years, in which he talks about how air travel looked in 1965. That decade was an era of exponential growth in air travel: Humans had only been flying airplanes for about sixty years, and the U.S. and Soviet Union were rapidly expanding their space travel capabilities. If you plotted a line of human transportation speed from 1750 to 1950, it would form an exponential curve. In the near future — a 1960s futurist might think — we would soon be flying on huge, comfortable supersonic jets. And shortly after that, we’d be riding on incredibly fast rockets, then nuclear rockets, and perhaps enjoying near-light speed interstellar travel by the early 2000s.

But it didn’t turn out that way. Supersonic jets turned out to be way too expensive and way too damaging to the ozone layer. Ordinary, high-capacity jets like the Boeing 747 turned out to be good enough, and economical enough, that they became the de facto standard. The models Boeing created in the 1970s form the backbone of the company’s lines today, with very slight differences and enhancements that are mostly invisible to non-experts. In fact, Cegłowski writes, some of today’s planes are actually slower than their 1970s predecessors: The Boeing 787 is slower than the 707.

We might be at a similar inflection point with Internet technologies today. In the past twenty years, we’ve seen enormous changes in the way people access and create information. The wide dispersion of Internet access has brought the world’s knowledge to every corner of the Earth; the shift to mobile devices has put that knowledge literally into the hands of everyone who can afford a cellphone and a monthly contract. Social networks make it easier than ever to connect with like-minded people around the world, and digital maps are shining a clear light into every corner of the Earth, simplifying navigation and enabling armchair travel to the most interesting, remote locations.

So you might think that the Web is advancing at the same, exponential rate that it has for the past 20 years. You’d be wrong: The Web is advancing only slowly, and in some ways, it’s getting worse.

Nilay Patel, writing this week in The Verge, pointed this out: The mobile Web sucks, the mobile browsers we use today are, in fact, slower and less capable than desktop browsers of five years ago. Our mobile browsers are more like 787s than Concordes.

Is the answer to app-ify everything, throw out the 20-to-40-year-old technology stack powering the mobile Web, and start over with something much faster, whizzier, and more modern?

I think not, for the simple reason that the mobile stack, flawed as it is, is the best platform we’ve got that isn’t totally controlled by Facebook, Google, or Apple. What we need, as Patel argues, are better browsers for our smartphones. We need, as Cegłowski argues, more widespread access and some decent fonts.

What we need is to stop thinking of the Web as a platform for transformative, exponential innovation. That kind of innovation is still happening in other spheres — like transportation and health care — but not in the Web. Stop expecting media companies, or encyclopedias, to behave like startups. Keep the open standards open, get a few billion more people onto the Web, and see what they come up with.

I bet that will lead to far more profound transformations than any new chat app or publishing platform could.

As Ebola raged through West Africa last summer, an experimental drug was tried for the first time on two American aid workers in Liberia who were gravely ill with the virus. Both recovered, one of them rapidly. Though it could not be said for sure that the drug, ZMapp, was responsible, patients and doctors began clamoring for it. But there was enough to treat only a handful of patients. Federal officials vowed to produce more. Six months later, very little has been produced, diminishing the chances that the drug can be used to treat large numbers of patients in the current outbreak, which appears to be ebbing. The delays show some gaps in preparedness and have frustrated biodefense and infectious disease experts. “I think it’s inexcusable that they haven’t moved on it,” said Dr. Philip K. Russell, a retired major general who once ran the United States Army Medical Research and Development Command. “They’ve had months.” Government officials announced on Thursday that a clinical trial to test whether ZMapp is effective would begin in Liberia, probably within three weeks. But that trial will involve at most 150 patients, the officials said. Efforts to procure more of the drug have run into snags, according to federal officials, researchers and biotechnology executives. The Department of Health and Human Services asked for proposals to produce more of it to be submitted by November, but so far, no contracts have been awarded. Facilities that Health and Human Services created, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, expressly for rapidly manufacturing drugs or vaccines in a public health emergency are not being used to produce ZMapp yet. The same is true, with one exception, of facilities the Department of Defense invested in to build the capacity for rapid response. Thomas W. Geisbert, an Ebola expert at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, said ZMapp and another drug also in short supply, called TKM-Ebola, were the most promising potential treatments for Ebola based on their effectiveness in treating monkeys. “Make more of them. We know they work,” he said. “If I were exposed to the virus, those are the two things I would want.” The government is now working with two leading biotechnology companies, Genentech and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, and reports rapid progress. Regeneron executives say that not only can they produce ZMapp, but they have also come up with drug candidates that might be even better. Federal officials defend their performance. “We feel with our partners that we’ve made significant progress in the Ebola crisis,” Robin Robinson, who is in charge of biodefense procurement for Health and Human Services, said in a news conference on Thursday. By government contracting standards, the effort might be moving at a lightning pace, just not fast enough for the epidemic. And problems unique to ZMapp have made it difficult to expect mass production. The drug is owned by a tiny company, Mapp Biopharmaceutical of San Diego, which has few resources of its own. ZMapp was in a very early stage of development when the outbreak began, and Mapp was not producing more because it had all it needed for early studies. ZMapp is a combination of three antibodies, which are immune system proteins that can home in on a virus and neutralize it. Partly because it had little money, Mapp chose to manufacture the antibodies in genetically modified tobacco plants. That seemed to be a less expensive way to get small quantities of the drug than the usual biotechnology industry method of producing antibodies in genetically engineered animal cells grown in stainless steel vats. But there are not many factories that can produce proteins in tobacco, limiting how much can be made now. A research arm of the Defense Department gave money several years ago to help set up facilities to produce vaccines rapidly in tobacco in the event of a pandemic. At least one of the centers passed a “live fire” test in 2012, producing 10 million doses of a flu vaccine in a month. But vaccines require a lot less material than antibodies. And after being formed, the tobacco production centers have had to drum up business to remain staffed and ready and have not always been able to do so. Production of ZMapp began in August at one of these facilities, Kentucky BioProcessing, which is now owned by Reynolds American, the cigarette company. That output is slated for the clinical trials beginning next month. The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or Barda, which is the biodefense procurement agency in Health and Human Services run by Dr. Robinson, decided to seek additional production. It turned to three centers it had set up on its own to provide rapid production of drugs and vaccines in an emergency. Two of the centers, one run by Texas A&M University and the other by the biotech company Emergent Biosolutions, submitted proposals by the Nov. 10 deadline. The third, run by Novartis, which is getting out of the vaccine business, did not. But those centers had no experience manufacturing using tobacco. So they had to work with the tobacco facilities that the Defense Department had financed. Dr. Russell, the retired Army biodefense official, said Barda might have saved time by dealing directly with the tobacco companies but probably felt a need to justify its investment in its own centers. Others say dealing with centers it was already familiar with allowed Barda to move faster. Still, no contracts have been awarded. Some industry executives say Barda found the bids too high. While Emergent, Texas A&M and Barda say the proposals are still under evaluation, Barda is exploring alternatives. The initial plan was to have the other centers produce ZMapp using the same technology employed by Kentucky BioProcessing. But another tobacco facility, Caliber Biotherapeutics, could not reach an agreement with Kentucky BioProcessing on licensing the technology, said a federal official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because contract discussions are continuing. Moreover, this official said, Kentucky felt it could not devote manpower to helping Caliber when it was scrambling to produce ZMapp on its own. So Barda is now letting tobacco production companies use their own technology. Dr. Robinson said in the news conference that the agency might go through the Defense Department, which has standing contracts with these facilities, to procure the drug. One company gearing up for possible production is Medicago, which declined to comment. Barda is also working with Genentech and Regeneron to see if the antibodies can be manufactured in Chinese hamster ovary cells, or CHO cells, the biotechnology industry’s usual method. There is a lot of capacity available for such production. Regeneron executives said they had developed CHO cells that can produce the ZMapp antibodies. But they have also developed their own antibodies that the company says bind to the virus more tightly and have better pharmaceutical properties. Since both sets of antibodies are probably at least somewhat different from ZMapp, they will have to be first tested in monkeys. That will happen soon, but it will delay their possible use in people. Dr. Robinson of Barda said hundreds or thousands of treatment courses made in tobacco could be available by the end of the year. And thousands of doses made in CHO cells could be available by then. Barda’s rapid response centers could be enlisted to help manufacture using CHO cells, he said. But it is possible the outbreak will be over by then. In West Africa, trials have begun of other drugs that do not yet have the same results in monkeys as ZMapp but that would be available in large quantities should they prove effective. Dr. George D. Yancopoulos, chief scientific officer of Regeneron, said the crisis had pointed up shortcomings in biodefense. “Nobody is really prepared,” he said. “Nobody in the world has rapid response capabilities.”