There Is No Cat

Where I Was

Elaine wants to know Where I Was. This is going to be kinda dull, I think; not much has changed.

1 year ago: I was married to Laura for a couple of years. I was working the same job I’m at today, but without the added excitement of an impending layoff. I still had my ponytail and beard and mustache; I don’t miss them. We were in the same house that we bought from my parents a few years ago, and I was in the middle of our first major project, remodeling the master bedroom. A year later, we’re still paying it off, but we’re very happy with how it turned out.

5 years ago: I was engaged to Laura for a few years. I was doing the same job I am now, but as a direct employee of the company for whom I’m doing it rather than at a distant remove (I’ll have to tell the story of that distant remove here soon). The bubble had burst, and working there was becoming distinctly uncomfortable, as the layoffs and buyouts which would eventually cost 80% of the company’s employees their jobs had started. We were living in a rented house that was too small for all our stuff, but which was otherwise nice. I liked the woods in the back yard; it made a great place for me to run an antenna for my shortwave radio. I wasn’t blogging here yet, but I had two other blogs, one (now defunct) about shortwave radio, and the other (mostly dormant recently, but with intentions to revive) about my genealogical research.

10 years ago: I was dating Laura. We had been together for about a year; by the end of the year, we would be engaged and living together, but that hadn’t happened yet 10 years ago (I’ll have to write down the story of how we got engaged some time). I was doing the same job I would be doing five years later, but hadn’t yet taken on responsibility for the famous research lab’s external web site. The world’s largest startup had just been expelled from its mother’s womb; I was originally slated to stay with the mothership, but wound up with the startup, taking over responsibility for the internal web site of the famous research lab. I was living in the same house I live in today, but my parents owned it then. I didn’t have nearly as much stuff as I do today. I had my own web site, but not at my own domain; my URL had a tilde in it (and it was on the same machine that Jorn Barger used at the time). If you had said the word "blog" to me at the time, I would have thought you were creating a new onomatopoeia for vomiting. So would everyone else, even Jorn, who didn’t coin the word "weblog" until December, 1997. I had recently bought my first domain for my radio club. I was still participating in Usenet, but increasingly disenchanted with the presence of spammers and the harvesting of e-mail addresses. By June, when the program that automatically posted the rec.radio.shortwave FAQ that I maintained to the net accidentally wiped itself and the FAQ out, I was ready to quit Usenet and move to the suburbs.

Posted at 8:18 PM