Thursday, March 30, 2023

Opening Day


BAL 1 0 0 4 3 0 2 0 0 | 10 15 2
BOS 1 0 0 1 0 2 0 3 2 |  9 11 1
WP: Kyle Gibson (1-0)
LP: Corey Kluber (0-1)
Note: Opening Day at Fenway Park38°F & sunny, MLB's pitch clock introduced, BOS pitchers walked 9 batters, BAL runners stole 5 bases, Donald Trump indicted

UPDATE (Apr 5th):

artist's sketch of Trump's arraignment, Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, Thomson Reuters

Thursday, March 09, 2023

The Wayback Machine

Oct 23rd, 1999 – menu with tiny icons, including my old Powerbook G3

A recent podcast on 99-Percent Invisible reminds me that there are archives of 'the OG internet' – an invitation to see if my old 'web 1.0' site is still out there. And it is!

In the late 1990's, BCS-Mac closed its offices (in Porter Square), ending my volunteer work as an activist and system administrator. Prior to that, most of my 'online time' was spent inside BCS-Mac's First Class bulletin board system. About the same time, HMI (my old employer) had some kind of partnership with MindSpring, and they gave me a complimentary account (still just $8.95/mo at the end). At HMI, we were developing a product called Web Workshop Pro (for kids to publish web pages), so this was also a place to test products and ideas.

In 2020, and without warning, Earthlink killed the mindspring.com domain. My web hosting account opened in 1998 – so it ran for over twenty years. After all that, my old site disappeared.

Thus, 2023 is the twenty-fifth anniversary of my presence on the 'internets'. So very odd to be looking at these ancient graphics and these hand-coded pages that had been lost – odd in a good way.


UPDATE (Mar 11th): John Gruber and Jason Kottke discuss anniversaries, the birth of blogging, and the Wayback Machine on The Talk Show. They even discuss suck.com, which is linked on my archived site.

Wednesday, March 01, 2023

A Day in the Life of David Newton


Our good friend David Newton has a show on the YouTube channel "The Artist's Well". David talks about 'collections':
So one of the things about the Sunday market is: the stuff that's on the ground, in the spirit of selection and spirit of found objects, I find this very compelling. If I put this element beside something else, it could become something else – it could become inseperable, might be ineteresting on a postcard. It could be part of something else, so, when this is combined. And people don't actually notice it.

… I learned something very important about finding things. This is fundamentally where artists live. … Something that's not a painting, that's not a sculpture, that's not like "aesthetic", can be aesthetic. And this Sunday market is purely that. And if you look, you may see; and if you see, you may just find something.