Days of Yore

Scott Rosenberg is working on a book about the early days of weblogging.

Since my name sometimes comes up when one looks at the very early weblogging days (as in 1997; see in particular Rebecca's Weblog Handbook), Scott pinged me about what things were like back then.

Well, that was 11 years ago! My memory is not that perfect.

Wouldn't it be handy if the old stuff were still around to look over and remind myself?

But too bad, the server on which my original site was hosted is long gone (my old friend schroeder.wustl.edu, a Centris running Mac System 7.5 or some such). So those files don't exist any more.

And the Internet Archive has a little of the old stuff cached, but not all of it.

But!

I still have the old content sitting around in a Frontier/RadioUserland file on this very laptop's hard drive, don't I?

And I've meant to re-publish that old old stuff for a long time now, right? You know, to really prove I was there. Really, on this very site can be found the string "(Archives from Feb 1997 - Nov 1998 still need to be dug up...)". But in all this years I've never actually made that effort.

Well.

Thankfully, my OS X Radio Userland from a few years ago can still read the old seb.root and NowThis.root files, and it can still publish. So I set about to recovering the Old Days.

There were some snags. I went through and fixed up a bunch of the absolute links to be relative. Somehow my #templates for the original site had gone away, but the Archive was helpful in recovering something much like it. Also, I lost the #glossary for that site, so recreating that was a bit of work (oh, I do miss the Frontier Glossary; Movable Type does not have such a beast, at least not in the version I'm using). I even had to dig into my old finalFilter script and tweak that a few times...

And so on! and so forth! Really, the process was exactly as much fun as reading about it. Quite tedious at times.

And then I hit Publish, and my old site exists again.

• http://nowthis.com/oldsite/ (the home page as I last left it)
• http://nowthis.com/oldsite/archive/ (the weblog proper)

Take that, entropy.

While not a perfect recreation, this is still pretty darn close; all the words are there, which is the important thing. Even the embarrassing, stupid ones. (For instance, I was mighty concerned at the time that Apple was going to disappear, which there seemed to be a real danger of. Thankfully they're well past that rough spot now.)

Looking back over the early stuff, it's clear that when I didn't have the constraints of the Modern Blogging Form as instantiated in Movable Type and WordPress, I had a very different approach to how to compose an entry.

My own "native" weblog format was very different from what the modern software tries to force you into -- What, you mean I can just post a single sentence about something without having to also come up with a title for it? I can just ramble on several topics at once without anything poking me to think about how to tag it or categorize it? Golly gee, that actually makes it sound like fun.

You'll find lots of broken links, since a lot of the sites are just gone now, and the major publications have nearly all changed their URL schemes and broken all the incoming links many times over in 11 years. (Personal sites to which I pointed have been much better about preserving ancient links. Go figure.)

Comment threads were nonexistent (OK, fine, some existed next door to the Web, on Usenet). If you wanted to comment on someone else's web writing, you wrote it on your own site and either notified the other person, or hoped they checked their referer logs.

Anyway.

It was fun to do the digging, and I've restored my little corner of 'net history. (If you find technical glitches on any of the pages, feel free to alert me so I can fix them further.)

Thanks to Scott R. for providing the catalyst for me getting around to this.

I may even take some lessons from the younger me about how to weblog.

    0 comment(s)   Add a comment...

 Now, This: Marcus!

Hey, we have a son!

I've been derelict in my duties not only as a proud husband & dad, but as one of the Really Early Webloggers, so here's a catchup post. Outsourcing the basics to mama Medley's own post from one week in:

Our son Marcus was born June 19, 2008. We are terrifically happy and impressed with him and feeling very fortunate.

Stats: 9 pounds 8 ounces; 20.75 inches long; full head of darkish hair; 15+centimeter head size; Mama's nose, Daddy's fingers, mouth, and ears; Grandfather's feet.

Short version of birth story: Tried to induce twice (he was post-dates and a large baby), after 24 hours of nothing much happening in second attempt, decided to do a c-section to avoid a 3 or 4 day-long painful induction that would likely result in a c-section anyway. Apgars of 8,9; handed to Daddy very quickly after he was born. No complications so far for me from the surgery. *knock wood*

Behaviors: Eats, pees, poos as expected -- seems to be doing fine with breastfeeding so far. Exhibits practice smiles that are charming. When awake/alert studies things and faces very intently and listens closely so that he always knows where Daddy is in the house. Sleeps very well so far *knock wood* again. Sweet-tempered and mellow.

He's now a month old, and he still changes every day. Like, say, his sleeping and feeding patterns. :)

Here are some of the pics so far that I really like from his Month 1 flickr set, mostly taken by Lyn:

As Brad noted, he already has more hair than Brad & I put together.

Still feeling wonderfully fortunate at all that has gone right.

Still looking forward to a getting a smile that isn't digestion-related.

He's growing plenty fast (around 12 pounds now...), and already has very strong legs, which he loves to demonstrate by not letting me bend them when I'm changing him (I think I passed my 200th diaper change this weekend. Not that I'm keeping track. :) ).

Speaking of which, this experience is definitely exposing me to more kinds of products and issues that I was blissfully neutral and/or ignorant regarding before. Like diaper technology. But, that's another post.

So, a belated bloggy welcome to little Marcus. You can follow some of his exploits on Twitter (he's been posting since he was in the womb).

    1 comment(s)   Add a comment...

 Harvey Korman

Harvey Korman of 'Burnett Show' Dies at 81 [NYT]

Harvey Korman, the award-winning comedic actor who rose to fame playing second banana to Carol Burnett on her television variety series and who starred in hit movies like "Blazing Saddles" and "High Anxiety," died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 81.

A tall man known for his outlandish characterizations, Mr. Korman was nominated for seven Emmys for his television work and won four. He also was nominated for four Golden Globe awards, winning one.

I did not know this:

Mr. Korman reunited with a Burnett alumnus, Tim Conway, and toured the country to give live performances, reprising skits from the old shows as well as creating new material. "They had a private jet and went all over," Katherine Korman said.

Comedian Harvey Korman, Laughing Until We Cried [WPost]

Described as the quintessential second banana, Korman became the embodiment of a classic comedy role: The scheming, mustachioed Talleyrand, unctuously seeming to serve his superior -- usually played by Brooks -- but ever plotting for his own gain, only to be hilariously undone by his vanity and unfortunate choice of names.

...Korman's most memorable work on "Carol Burnett" came from mistakes.

He seemed incapable of sharing a scene with Conway without cracking up. ... if he and Korman made eye contact, Korman was down for the count. The shorter Conway would gaze up at Korman, fixing him with a blank stare, as Korman tried in vain to get off his line, his face contorted in comic agony, his rigid body rippling with unsuppressible snickering. By then, the audience at home was in tears.

Understand this: It is a generous act by a comic actor to let the audience see him break character. That means he is comfortable enough in his skin to let the other actor have his moment. And Korman knew that sometimes the best way to get someone else to laugh is simply to let them see you doing it.

Similarly,it's always a kick to see Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert break each other up.

I was trying to think of who would fill a Harvey-Korman-like role these days, and couldn't come up with anyone.

    0 comment(s)   Add a comment...

 Things to Teach the Boy

(I'm starting a list.)

• You will never finish everything that you will decide you want to do. Even if you started now.

  On the one hand, this can be depressing. On the other hand... no, there's really no other hand.

  The point is, choose wisely how you spend your time.

• Don't stand in the middle of highways at any time of day, but most especially in the middle of the night. You would think this would be obvious to more people, but apparently it needs to be explicitly said.

• One of my favorite life lessons is in a quote from Aristotle:

  Anybody can become angry - that is easy
  but to be angry with the right person
  and to the right degree
  and at the right time
  and for the right purpose,
  and in the right way -
  that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.

  I'm still working on this myself.

  But if we can teach it successfully, we'll have done a significant chunk of the whole raising-a-decent-human job.

  The listing of various forces and entities which will make this difficult -- say, by:

  • spreading guilt by association;
  • sowing suspicion and resentment against entire races/nationalities/categories of people;
  • telling you, the special special audience that THOSE PEOPLE think they are BETTER THAN YOU / are LAUGHING AT YOU / are LOOKING DOWN ON YOU and HOW DARE THEY, those elitists, god, don't you just want to go punch every last one of them in the face! (P.S. Buy my book.)

  .. is left for the reader's contemplation at this time.

  "Be angry with the right person, to the right degree. The More You Know."

• Your mother is awesome.

    1 comment(s)   Add a comment...

 Brief Shining Moment

I don't expect this to last, but for now, the Nationals are alone in first place in their division, having won the first two games of the season. The Mets, Phillies, Braves and Marlins all have worse records. Yee-hah, w00t, arriba.     0 comment(s)   Add a comment...

 Anybody check the calendar?

UPDATED: Aha.. Apparently the blog post I referenced below was an April Fool by Barry Ritholtz of the Big Picture himself. The bullish April Fool's column by Mr. Kass exists, but the media reaction Ritholtz described was invented. How double-reverse-meta.

Sadly, the post was a quite easily believable and not weird/implausible enough to trigger my BS detector.

Following my own advice to think before passing on information, I had in fact tried (before posting it at all) to look at the original bullish column, but it was behind a subscription wall so I was unable to do aught but rely on Mr. Ritholtz's prior reliability.

Someone completely changing their outlook and putting 'April Fool' at the end (as Kass apparently did do in his original column) is clearly a joke.

A media critic (as Barry often is) criticizing the media for something they could well have done is far from clear as a spoof. (Some of the mentioned reports were on TV, no less, which isn't as easy to verify for oneself after the fact.)

I will have to be more careful, obviously.

---

When a pessimistic analyst suddenly turns impossibly rosy, it might behoove one to think for a second.

Internet Hoax Gooses Stock Market [fake blog post from The Big Picture]

Dedicated short fund manager Doug Kass, of Seabreeze Partners Short LP, put out an early morning, tongue-in-cheek commentary, titled "Time to Buy the Bull?" The long time Bearish market pundit and writer for The Street.com and Real Money announced that he was raising his year end price targets for the S&P500 to 1,666, which would reflect a yearly gain of 26%. [!!]

The Financial press read the commentary literally. The WSJ announced "Bear Flips Bullish!," causing equity futures to rally. CNN Money covered the joke as if it were a real news item, and Marketwatch declared "Short Seller Starts Stock Rampage." Barron's headline read "Longtime Bear Tosses in the Towel; Says New Bull Market is Upon Us."

...

The veteran fund manger had assumed that readers would get the April Fool's joke -- but never imagined it would go over the heads of veteran financial writers.

Some people really, really want to believe.

    2 comment(s)   Add a comment...

 Overheard in Pittsburgh today

Downtown, Indian restaurant, lunchtime. Quoted/paraphrased as well as I can remember. Two white guys.

"Hey man, you want to get in on the pool?"
"What pool?"
"If Obama gets the nomination. You pick a day between that and the election, or when he'd be sworn in; you pick which day you think somebody'll get him."
"What?"
"Come on, there are people out there. You can't swing a dead cat without hittin' somebody who's going to want to do it. Some white guy will get him, you know it."
"Man, only you would think of that."
"It's $20 each."
"$20!"
"It'll be some sweet pot, come on."
"I don't have $20 to put on that."
"Dude. You'll miss out, somebody's going to do it."

"They are all over this town."

"They're all over this country."

Oh, and the security the Secret Service has been providing both Obama and Clinton has been ... somewhat lacking.

    1 comment(s)   Add a comment...

 Naming thread

So apropos of Dannette's comment, we do have to come up with a name for this critter.

We're plowing through some lists of baby names and are working on a short list.

We have some time left to go, so in the spirit of many heads being better than two, we figured we'd open the floor if anyone wants to weigh in.

We won't pick one for sure until he's here, and until then I need some way to refer to him, so: maybe little Barack, for now. ;)

    10 comment(s)   Add a comment...

 News of late

Two big changes are happening around here.

First, I'm going to be a dad. We're pretty sure Medley's the mom. Here's her post about it.

The little fellow is due to ship in June. We're crossing our fingers that he'll stick to the release schedule. Lots to do!

Second, I've changed jobs; in January I left my regular gig of four years and am plying the software engineering trade in the financial services sector now.

So, that's some of what's keeping me/us busy. How about you?

    14 comment(s)   Add a comment...

 super tuesday. get off my lawn.

This is a day full of primaries that actually matter, and I'm stuck in a place with CNN on the tube.

I avoid CNN like the plague in general, but I don't have a choice here.

So the level of stupid, predictable, empty-headed anchor and guest blather is exactly what I expected it might be, and my goodness a little goes a long way.

I used to watch the Sunday interview shows a lot (some in high school, a lot in college and after), until it finally became clear how much they are about the "journalists", their narcissism and the storylines they want to peddle rather than the search for any genuinely interesting information or the questioning of truly dubious statements.

I miss David Brinkley. Dude, in hindsight, you were The Man.

    0 comment(s)   Add a comment...

 Happy New Year 2008

I think 'happy new year' may rank as the phrase most often repeated in any one day on Twitter.

We've been watching season 3 of The Wire today. Awesome stuff, highly recommended if you enjoy (but are starting to be bored by) ordinary cop shows.     2 comment(s)   Add a comment...

 Normal Service to Resume in 2008

Not gone, just away for a bit. Been mighty occupied with lots of transitions and upheavals this month. Stories to come.   Meta   0 comment(s)   Add a comment...

 I Voted (Virginia off-year edition)

Virginia elects its legislature and County officials in odd years, so unlike much of the country, today was again Election Day here.

Went to the polls around 6:20am.

No line at all at that time. Zip in, zip out. And of course it was pitch dark and raining..

For my half of the alphabet I was the 15th voter.

The ballot had about 12 offices, bond issues & other questions on it. Busy election.

And of course the county continues to use WinVote, a computerized voting solution. Just like all computerized voting -- when you really, really want no reliable audit trail or chance for a recount.

    0 comment(s)   Add a comment...

 catching up a bit

From 10/19:

From 10/22:

From 10/23:

From 10/24:

    0 comment(s)   Add a comment...