End of Another Era

It was announced months ago, but it has now come to pass. GeoCities is no more.

As if I didn't feel old enough already. Now I feel really old.

One of the fancy-dancy technological wonders of my early adulthood - one in which I played a small part – has disappeared. It was my first real foray into the World-Wide Web, that bizarre offshoot of the Internet which we at Boeing first noticed around 1993. One of the guys (Scott, you know who you are!) brought in this really cool “Mosaic” browser program which we could run on Windows 3.1, and we played around with this new HyperText Markup Language (HTML) which allowed us to “publish” our documents across the company intranet. And Scott figured out how to access a few interesting external Internet sites.

After Boeing laid everybody off at the end of the 777 program, we all went out and found new jobs, and I happened to end up at Microsoft, helping with the launch of Windows 95 and the Microsoft Network (MSN), running data mining tools on the back-end servers for what promised to be a huge money-making machine for Mr. Gates.

It was a marvelous experience. Having spent ten years in the bureaucratic system that was Boeing, now enjoying the wonders of working in Redmond - the beautiful, ever-changing, ever-expanding campus, the incredible food, the camaraderie of fellow software geeks, the toys, the video games in every corner of the building, the free sodas and popcorn, the toss-'em-in, sink-or-swim attitude of management - and being on the forefront of the web explosion, when the web was suddenly exploding beyond the limited domain of engineers and academia and opening up to the entire world. We were all excited, like children with a new toy.

One day somebody emailed the team about this new site, GeoPages or something, which allowed people to 'homestead' on the web, establish their own little website on the Frontier. It sounded kinda corny, and kinda cool, all at the same time.Sure, MSN was giving away sites, too, but they were wanting something for the privilege. GeoPages/Cities was free. And it was set up like neighborhoods, where you settled in a place with other people who had the same interests. (For some reason, I was in the political discussion area.)

And what did we put on our wonderful websites? ('We' in the general sense)

Utterly boring, self-referential essays about ourselves. Pictures of our families, or our cats or dogs. MIDI files, endlessly repetitive. Funny original stories that weren't good enough for real publication. Other funny stories we'd "borrowed" from other places. Links to everywhere, using link buttons (left, right, up, down) throughout. All the news that was fit to print, and all available at the incredible speed of 14400 kilobaud! Man, we were cooking!

I wish I'd kept copies of those website files around someplace. I might actually have some of them on an old floppy disk somewhere. But it's been nearly fifteen years. Not sure if they're still even readable.

[I checked. They're still readable. But, oh, so embarrassing!]

After that, things changed quickly. The Internet became ubiquitous, our PCs got faster, our network connections got faster, our lives got complicated. It became impossible to keep up with it all, especially to write pithy little notes about (complete with pictures!).

Not even the introduction of the blogosphere could help with that problem. Sure, now it was insanely easy to maintain a presence on the Web. Yet, still, there just aren't enough hours in the day to get everything done, and unfortunately, anything that requires real effort (as HTML often does) must go by the wayside. One by one, all the various websites we were attempting to maintain, became stale, unused, un-maintained. GeoCities was the last non-blog site to go. And then Yahoo! announced that the site would be going away.

I'll miss it, though. It was relatively easy to create cool websites, even with the size/space restrictions (although when they put the embedded ads in and crippled all the user-embedded scripting, it wasn't nearly as cool as it once was). I kept mine very simple, very sparse, as low-impact as possible (partially due to the size restrictions imposed on the users by Yahoo!). And it kept the family up-to-date (mostly) with pictures of the kids, the cats, etc.

But then Blogger came along, and Facebook, and other sites which made it easy just to type words and upload pictures. So why bother writing HTML from scratch anymore?

Oh, well. Time marches on. Progress continues. Entropy grows.

Wrong Day to be Ill

I took the day off today because yesterday around two in the afternoon, my body started aching all over and my brain started pounding and my throat started hurting and it dawned on me that I'd been spending the last few days in the company of people who weren't exactly feeling up to par, hacking and coughing all over the place, and it was very likely that some microbial substance was, at that very moment, mounting an invasion on my home turf. And it occurred to me that it would be advantageous to the war effort that the majority of my time over the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours be spent in a relatively motionless position, allowing my immune system to utilize the available energy reserves so that, in due time, I could return to work.

For this reason, I did not arise from my bed until nearly noon today.

Naturally, today was the warmest day in the past week. Seventy degrees. With little breezes to keep the warmth from becoming too excessive (for those of us expecting forties and fifties).

When Adam came home from school, he told me how warm it was and he had to take me out to the back porch to prove to me that it was, indeed, warm; and we stood on the back deck enjoying the breeze while the Japanese beetes (masquerading as Ladybugs) and wasps and bees (looking very puzzled, because they'd already packed up their things for winter vacation, and what was all this warm weather stuff going on?) buzzed around hour heads in total, joyous abandon (and confusion).

It's one of those days that is just perfect for skipping school or skipping work or skipping some other important responsibility, knowing that this will be the last warm day for a millenia and soon the rain and snow will be falling and we'll all be huddled around the heater in the living room trying to remember what it felt like to have the sun on our faces without a blistering wind to peel the skin off.

It's a lousy day to be sick in bed.

So to make up for all the gloom of feeling lousy, let's take a look at a few cheery pictures, shall we?

Mary is growing up way too quickly, and I was reminded of this again a few weeks ago when Grandma and Grandpa Green came to visit, and Grandma Green was helping Mary with a sewing project, and in the course of an afternoon (or thereabouts), Mary was able to create her very own pajamas.


Mary is also noticing that, if she borrows Daddy's glasses, she can see things better in the far-off distance. Congratulations, Mary! You've inherited your Daddy's astigmatism! (But you look much cuter in glasses than he does...)


A couple weeks ago, Mary and her class went down to the Museum to see the Leonardo da Vinci exhibit, and one of the activity areas they had set up for kids was Drawing a Self-Portrait. I was chaperoning, which means standing around with great anxiety, trying to keep the children from breaking things when their main objective seemed to be trying to break things. At one point, I detected an unfamiliar silence; looking around, I noticed a large clump of children gathered around the Self-Portrait area. Like any dictator worth his salt, I immediately surmised that some underground rebellion was stewing, and marched over to break it up. To my surprise, all the children were gathered around my child, who was sitting on the stool in front of the easel and mirror, doing a fantastic self-portrait of herself, while her classmates stood with open mouths.


It is these precious, scary moments that bring to parents the realization that their little fledglings will soon be all grown up with lots of places to go, very soon. Much sooner than we are ready to accept.

This composite shot sorta reminds me of the The Brady Bunch.

Another First Class Boy Scout

In the end, it was all about the cooking.



Of all the tasks that needed to be accomplished to meet the First Class Scout requirements, the only one with a substantial commitment of time and effort was the Cooking requirement, because it had to be done in the course of a campout. Perhaps that is why it was nearly the last one to be completed.



James wasn't really eager to go on the campout - it's not one of his favorite activities - but he was eager to get it done and over with so he could get on with his life. And if the only thing standing between him and the First Class rank was this campout, he was going to do it.



I had thought that he only had to take care of one full day's meals to meet the requirement, but he decided to go full-bore and do all the meals. Prior to the campout, he and Cheryl came up with the menus and shopped for the food, then James practiced a few of the meals at home to make sure he had the meat/vegetable timing worked out.



At the campout, the Scoutmaster commented on the good food; he was very pleased with the fare. I'm not sure if it was the bacon and egg concoction we had Saturday morning, or the delicious steakburgers we had for lunch, or the spaghetti and meatballs (with garlic bread) we had for dinner, but it all turned out wonderfully (mostly that means it was on time and on temperature!). On Sunday, since he wasn't really required to cook anything, we had donuts and cereal for breakfast and ready-to-roll sandwiches for lunch (easy cleanup for people on the go).

We had a quorum of adults at the campout, so James was able to get his Scoutmaster conference and Board of Review done while we were there, and they approved his rank advancement.

So the very next Tuesday at our Court of Honor, James became an official First Class Boy Scout!



You can tell his parents are very proud of his achievement.



We aren't sure how much further he's going to take this, especially in light of all his other interests (art, music, etc.), but we are very proud of him for taking the initiative and doing what needed to be done!