Going to take a small break from the journal entries to dip into another vein of memories. A couple of coworkers of mine (well, one ex-coworker) were waxing nostalgic about our baby steps in the world of web design. It's pretty hideous stuff, to be sure. But, I will not muddle this entry with many words. Here is every version of my site that I still have code/screen caps for:
I will open this post with a profuse apology to my aunt and god mother, Jennie, who's kind birthday gift of free money was apparently shat upon by my younger self (how I hate him).
Again, I have done my best to preserve grammatical and spelling errors. Let the war on commas continue...
Fourth Entry July 28, 1999 It'll probably take a few pages to catch up on the latest events. Our two weeks were successfully completed. We're going to see the "Phantom Menace" on Sunday. Yesterday we went swimming. I did a bunch of diving. I also did a 360. I tryed to do a front flip but belly floped. Mom found out I had been on AOL. My computer privaliges have been revoked for a long time. I finally got my thing from Jen. A K-Mart Card. A whopping ten bucks. Whee. My shoe landed at Wisconson. A new record. My foot is just about healled.I got a letter from Val last week. I got a couple neat "Episode I" books. One's a vehicle cross-section book. The other is "The making of STAR WARS: The Phantom Menace" book. The Mos Espa stands (the people in them anyway) are colored Q-tips. Oh Yeah! I forgot. I got a watch strap with the K-Card. Tomorrow I'm gonna get me some goggles. My day's of batboy are over. I also got to play. The other team forfieted on our second game. And I finally got to play. Dad's letting me have his old ball shirt. I fixed it up with the stinky marker. Yuck! My fish is probably close to a couple months old. I used my book certificate to get Jedi Apprentice #2. I hope the library gets #3 soon. That's right your eyes aren't play tricks on you. Jedi Apprentice #3 Hidden Past. Great isn't it. But now as I close this entry is the most exciting news. I HAVE A PEN-PAL!!!! His name is John [name redacted]. I got his letter two days after I got my GO FORTH. Jeff Chis and Stevie were on the list too. And Joey was in the new baby spot. Well! Better get to be. Soon it's....
Thoughts - For whining about the "meager" K-mart card, I certainly had that money spent >_>
Of all the things mentioned here, I latch onto the mention of my fish the most. This was the last fish I had and also the longest living one, dying somewhere at the incredible age of five years old (at least, five years under my care). At the time this was written, I suspect I had not yet named him. Eventually he came to be known as Fishface, but it was not a conscious "I'm going to here on refer to you as Fishface" kind of thing. I just continually referred to him as that and it stuck. God, I miss that fish....
Also, I myself could not remember what the successful "two weeks" thing was all about. Some bribe from my parents, no doubt. Jeff seems to think that it was going to bed on time for two weeks, which would certainly be fitting for ourselves at the time.
Go Forth was a small time Catholic periodical for kids. I don't remember much about the content outside of the fact that the back page was full of "user generated content," for lack of a better term, and also a list of kids' names/ages/addresses for the pen pal list. I had no less than three pen pals from that, none of which I have been in contact with for many, many years.
We're back from the SOPA/PIPA blackout and will now engage in digging through the ancient depths of my past.
Last Monday, as I was furiously trying to find a screwdriver (which I found sitting out in the open after I had reorganized my entire closet....), I discovered my old journals from way, way back, 1999 and 2000 to be exact. Curious to know what my life as a 13-year-old was like (I myself don't remember), I decided to give them a read.
There's some fantastic stuff in there, highlighting the innocence of childhood, beaming forth with an unparalleled naivete. There are good times and not so good times, all poured forth in raw detail. I will take some time and post a few choice excerpts. Today I start with the earliest (surviving) entry. I have written it out exactly as I wrote it then, preserving grammatical and spelling mistakes.
Third Entry - Festival 66 July 16, 1999 Well today was the day of Festival 66! I got up early this morning. Got my chores done quick. After Chris finished eating we played some nintendo. Mom also called in for my good inhaler. The morning was a drag. Finally lunch came. Festival 66 was at 2:00. I thought it was at 1:00. Oh well! Mom let us play nintendo again. Before you know it it's time to leave. We parked at the church parking lot. Se we walked to the Credit Union to meet Dad. We picked our lost and found spot and Jeff, Chris and I were off. First we got sprites and went to play games. We went to a ball game first. The point was to get a bunch of the same color on the board. I got a cheesy top. Whee. Next we went to a ring toss game. I ringed a chihuahua and got one. Then we went to bingo. Did Chris ever whine. They were giving away a toaster. I JUST HAD TO WIN! I imagined the look on Mom & Dad's face when I walked up to them with a chihuahua in one arm and a TOASTER in the other. But I lost. On our way out who do we run into. But Mom and Dad. So we went to a couple other games. Jeff won a baseball helmet at the speed pitch. He won a stray hat at the poker chip toss. Then we went to golf on my second shot I made it into the ring and got some golf balls. We went to back to play bingo. After the game Stevie was getting fussy so mom ordered us out. We went to get something to eat. We found the hot dogs. Boy were they good. Then we got a snowcone. Of course I got grape we sat down to eat them. But halfway through I spilled mine. So we went to play more games. On the way Jeff, who had gone to get a snow cone, mosied off. We found him and went to the rubber band shoot. I hit nothing. But Jeff hit one and got a miniature hat. We were going to our last place when we ran across dad. He said mom had been looking for us. I told him I was going to get a soda. There was a small line so I had to wait. When I got back dad was gone, so I went to our "place". After a few minutes the rest of the family showed up and we went home. Boy it was great to be in a cool place again. I got a letter from Val, which surprised me. Then mom went to get the groceries. We played nintendo while she was gone. About 8:00 we went down to the court. I beat my old shoe record. I kicked it to... (brace yourself)... ILLINOIS!!! But it cost me my foot. I jumped off from fairly high, barefoot, and killed my left foot. So I hobbled home. We watched the end of a Bob Hope movie. Finally at 9:00 Mom came home... And she forgot my prescription!!! A good day ended in tragedy.
This passage alone encapsulates so many aspects of my youth. Also, those super short sentences and terrible use - or lack of use - of punctuation. I shudder.
Festival 66 was a company wide festival of sorts that then Phillips 66 would hold during the summer. They would block off a couple of streets downtown and had carnival games and free food. Being that my dad works for them, we got to partake in the festivities.
"The court" was the playground of a school down the street from us. Adjacent to the swing set they had was a giant map of the US. I liked to kick my shoes off whilst swinging and used the map as a measurement of distance.
RedditBots Source: [ Download ]
One day, somewhere between Christmas and New Years, a coworker of mine was musing out loud about a vanity reddit account he had created. He was describing exactly what it would do and I was like "dude. We can automate that." So, in a fury of coding and some poring over reddit documentation, I pulled together a very simple bot that did exactly what he had described. Slapped it on an every ten minutes cron job and called it a day. The code was ugly and I vowed to make a nicer version.
That I did and, while I was at it, decided that I should make it a simple framework with which I could bots in a simple manner and have a central script that managed them all. The above source is what I settled on (complete with a working, if not banned, version of a binky79 clone).
My own bot idea, as it was Christmas, was for a bot named Ebeneezer_McUpvote (a portmanteau of Ebenezer Scrooge, Scrooge McDuck and everyone's favorite reddit term, upvote) to randomly upvote a new link and add the comment "Merry Christmas! Have an upvote ^ _ Q". Scripted, running, would execute every five minutes.
As of this writing, that bot has -310 comment karma. Now here's where the fickleness of reddit shows through.
Yesterday, as I was browsing, I came upon this post. So, Oprah giving random upvotes is considered cool, eh?
Enter, OprahGivesAnUpvote. She does pretty much EXACTLY the same thing as Ebeneezer_McUpvote, only she says "Look under your chair... you got an UPVOOOOOOOOTE!!". People love her. OprahGivesAnUpvote has, at this writing, 233 comment karma and she's only been running since yesterday morning.
Why the hatred? I dunno. Maybe people don't get the joke of Ebeneezer_McUpvote. Maybe the joke just sucks. Maybe it's not Christmas anymore. Either way, Oprah is loved, McUpvote is not. I'll be interested to see if Ebeneezer's fortune turns around when we get closer to Christmas again...
Well, here we are again. It's always such a pleasure. Remember when I did this last year? I do. Seems like it wasn't that long ago. But, time flies, as they say, and with increasing age, it does so with increased velocity, it seems. This calls for some retrospective and forward contemplation.
