40 years ago today, the first ever inter-network message was sent between two computers: “lo”! And that became the internet. This first message, between the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Stanford Research Institute, fell a bit short of its original intent, however. Len Kleinrock and his team at UCLA were actually trying to [...]
There comes a moment in every budding web developer’s life, I think, when you’re left staring incomprehensibly at the screen, cradling the slow realization that everything you’d worked on was totally and utterly wiped, and that you were pretty much French toasted for file backups. Like many half tech-savy, gen Y kids who grew up [...]
In grad school, one of my favorite writing exercises was a five minute free write at the beginning of class. Prof. Jane Anne Staw usually gave us a topic, but where you went from that was only limited by your imagination. Each following week, we would take the paragraph from the class before and select [...]
The decision to make the trip to APE (Alternative Press Expo) in San Francisco this year was totally spur-of-the-moment, but worked out much better than the soggy, rain-ladden venture we made last year. Plenty of sunshine and a great parking spot made a great start, and I found both a Catbutt City mug as well [...]
Went to a Laser Quest laser tag game last night, courtesy of Neil, who was celebrating his 12th birthday. I haven’t been to the place in years. Roaming the darkened, dimly fluorescent hallways of their laser tag hallways is still fun, but I found myself with very little less tolerance for the dim and the [...]
It’s the official end of an already bygone era: GeoCities, the online, free web building and community site will be shuttering its doors before the end of the month. New accounts are no longer available, and users are encouraged to download their data from their server to their own personal computers or to move to [...]
The English language is a funny thing. It borrows words from the world over, such as hammock from the long-extinct Taino tribe in the Bahamas, wok from the Chinese, or otaku from the Japanese. And how about whole new words entering the language through communication on the internet? New words like blog and leet, which [...]