End of an Era, Start of Vacation

It was back in 1995, as I recall, just a few weeks after the end of my illustrious ten-year career with The Boeing Company, that we first heard about GeoCities. At Microsoft, where I was contracted as a tester for MSN, we were exploring the early Internet and trying out all the free websites. Somebody in the office heard about GeoCities and told everyone else, and soon we all had our own sites. Back in those days, we were doing it as part of our testing; our assignment was to make sure Windows 95 and MSN were able to handle the fancy HTML from as many sites as possible.

It was an intriguing idea, venturing forth into the wild frontier of the Web, putting meaningless drivel out there for others to see, trying to figure out where all the websites were; this was before the major search engines were available. We had a wonderful time playing around, watching the Browser Wars, updating our HTML (or DHTML) as advances occurred.

At one point, after I'd spent a great deal of time working with jscript to make my site a really cool visual experience (akin to a commented slide show), GeoCities thwarted my humble ambitions by forcing all the 'free' sites to incorporate their auto-advertisement wrapper script; this meant that all viewers of the free sites would be inundated with annoying ads. It also broke my jscript.

I had to return to a simple, static format. And the site sorta got boring. In the end, it didn't really matter. I had no time to give it the attention it deserved, and it was only useful to keep the grandparents up-to-date with pictures of the grandkids.

Yahoo! bought GeoCities some time ago. That is never a good thing. Sure, they promise to keep things the same for a period of time, but you know it's bound to change. And it adds a level of annoyance that can be frustrating.

No more. I've put up the last picture. Soon, Yahoo! will close GeoCities, and the site will disappear.

Several of the old 'free' sites are doing something similar. It's no longer economically feasible to give out so much free space, I suppose. And that's fine, since they are in it for the money, not as a charity.

But it's not worth it to me, paying money to put up pictures and words that very few people care about. I haven't had the time to do a good job of it, and I hate putting out stuff that isn't worth reading.

The Flickr site will probably end up in the same boat. They've already started restricting access to the free users, and that's going to be one big hassle from now on out. So I'm not even going to bother with it anymore.

We still have Blogger (here) and Facebook, but it wouldn't surprise me if those go Pay-Per-View in the near future as well, given the economic situation. Just get people addicted enough to think they can't live without it, and then start reeling 'em in, that's the way it's done.

* *

I was supposed to start my vacation last Friday - gotta use up five days in April or lose 'em -- but there was simply too much to do at work, so I ended up working it anyway.

Started the real vacation today, working on the basement. Got some more insulation up, did a bit of re-organizing, can't figure out how I'm going to get all these jobs done by the end of the week, but we'll give it the ol' college try.

Today's effort doesn't look like much. It took a lot longer than I'd planned. I've been feeling pretty tired all day long, even after a good night's sleep.

Before	After

Oh, well. It's a start.