About this site

During my freshman year at Valpariso Univeristy (1994-1995) I had an account on the university VAX mainframe system. Sometime during that year, Auri Rahimzadeh came and told me and a couple of other Electrical and Computer Engineering majors that we were eligable for accounts on the Engineering Department's Unix system. We promptly followed him over to Gellersen and signed up. Later, he showed us he was able to create a webpage on the Unix server and briefly told us how. Auri printed out and handed me a copy of "The Barebones Guide to HTML". I briefly created a page.

Later in 1995 after I left Valpo, the WWW began to take off and I logged in a created a page that looks pretty much the same as it does now - same background, text and link colors, etc. In 1996, I created a "mirror" page on Geocities.com (in College Park) because it was new and free and I began to fear that any day they would yank my account on gem.valpo.edu, since I had been gone a year. It was identical in every way except the title was "The Unofficial Homepage". It took another couple of years before they disabled my account. I changed the name on the now Yahoo Geocities site to "Official" and that was that.

Fast forward to 2007, and I was about to have my first child. My wife decided she wanted a website that she could upload pictures and add content to about the baby. I figured the easiest way was to use the blogging tools on Yahoo, so I brought down my site and turned on the blogging tool. I wanted a new host for my page so I happened upon freeshell.org. It seemed to be the perfect match, good old tradional Unix shell account like I had at Valpo with BBS roots. I have a few newfangled deals on here now to make my index page show up in searches on the major engines, but if you view the source on any given page, you'll be easily able to tell I wipped open a text editor (PICO if I telneted in, Notepad if I'm using FTP) and just started typing, just as I did in 1995. I also have a Gopher Space on this server - gopher was huge back then, there was way more available on gopher than on the web. I also have a .plan file on here, although I used finger the other day on almost every online user and none had a plan file, even the "sysop" SMJ. I guess part of me is stuck in 1995...

Now that Yahoo has shut down Geocities, I'll move the remaining stuff over here when I get a chance.

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