There Is No Cat

The alternative to flowers!

Friday, April 7, 2006

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

Comments

Note: I’m tired of clearing the spam from my comments, so comments are no longer accepted.

Not much has changed, huh? When I read it, it sounds to me like a lot has changed... jmho.

Posted by The XYL at 7:12 AM, April 8, 2006 [Link]

Trackbacks

This site is copyright © 2002-2024, Ralph Brandi.

What do you mean there is no cat?

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

- Albert Einstein, explaining radio


There used to be a cat

[ photo of Mischief, a black and white cat ]

Mischief, 1988 - December 20, 2003

[ photo of Sylvester, a black and white cat ]

Sylvester (the Dorito Fiend), who died at Thanksgiving, 2000.


Stylesheets


This site is powered by Missouri. Show me!

Valid XHTML 1.0!

Valid CSS!

XML RSS feed

Read Me via Atom

new host

Me!

Home Page
Resume
Married
Photographs
Flickr Photostream
Instagram Archive
Twitter Archive

last.fm

There Is No Cat is a photo Ralph Brandi joint.


Archives

Search



Family Blogs

Geneablogy
Jersey Girl Dance
Awakening
DullBlog
Mime Is Money

Blogs I Read

2020 Hindsight
AccordionGuy
Adactio
Allied
Apartment Therapy
Assorted Nonsense
Backup Brain
Burningbird
Chocolate and Vodka
Creative Tech Writer
Critical Distance
Daily Kos
Dan Misener likes the radio
Daring Fireball
Design Your Life
design*sponge
Doc Searls
Edith Frost
Elegant Hack
Emergency Weblog
Empty Bottle
Five Acres with a View
Flashes of Panic
Future of Radio
Groundhog Day
Hello Mary Lu
iheni
Inessential
Interllectual
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents
Jersey Beat
John Gushue ... Dot Dot Dot
john peel every day
JOHO The Blog
Kathryn Cramer
Kimberly Blessing
La Emisora de la Revolucion
Lacunae
Loobylu
mamamusings
Medley
mr. nice guy
MyDD
Orcinus
oz: the blog of glenda sims
Pinkie Style
Pinkie Style Photos
Pop Culture Junk Mail
Seaweed Chronicles
Shortwave Music
Slipstream
Talking Points Memo
The Unheard Word
Tom Sundstrom - trsc.com
Typographica
Unadorned
Vantan.org
WFMU's Beware of the Blog