Rusty's Blog

I was inspired to take down some of my Internet history when Amber and Garrett had discussed writing similar posts a few days ago. Amber has since published a post.

I’m going for an executive summary here and will probably miss a few important items, but if I try to be a perfectionist about this I’ll never end up writing anything. I am also including some pre-Internet backstory that I think is also important to take down. Read more after the jump.

Pre-Internet

I’m part of the first generation of kids who doesn’t know what it’s like not to have cable television. While it wasn’t as common for houses to have a computer during this time, I have never known a time where I wasn’t using one.

My dad built his own PCs from kits before they were even sold in stores, and my earliest memory of using a computer is playing a Ghostbusters game on the Commodore 64. I had my own plastic box of large floppy disks for the C64, which I remember was very exciting to me at the time.

I also played Oregon Trail in (I think) my third or fourth grade glass. The school had not purchased enough computers for every classroom to have one, so the few computers they had rotated from room-to-room. Every kid got an allotment of time they could use the computer.

In middle school, I submitted a paper typed and printed from Word for Windows and the teacher accused me of having my parents write the paper for me. My mom had to convince her otherwise.

Early days

Before the World Wide Web, there were bulletin board services like Compuserve and Prodigy. We never had these in our house, but I had a friend who had Prodigy. Naturally, in middle school we downloaded the Anarchist’s Cookbook and never did anything with it, but it seemed like an act of rebellion of some sort at the time.

I didn’t have my own computer until college, but started sending emails and using message boards and chat rooms around my junior or senior year of high school.

Freshman year of college (late 1997-early 1998)

My dad built a computer for me, a gigantic beige tower with a sluggish (even then) 75 mhz Pentium processor and Windows 95 on it along with a crappy CRT monitor to take with me to the University of Tennessee. Not long after arriving in school, he sent me a Windows 98 beta that I installed on there.

During this time I went from someone who was slightly ahead of the curve compared to average to being an Internet junkie. It was the year in my history that was more influential on my current computing habits than any other.

UT still had people log into their email and perform other tasks using a Unix terminal over Telnet, which turned out to be a blessing for me because it helped me conceptualize a lot of what was going on behind the scenes. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I started thinking of computing in platform-agnostic terms.

The university also provided free web hosting space to all students. I went through six or seven web pages that year, mostly creating pages with links to .wav files from movies I liked and lots of animated GIFs. This was also done over Telnet, hand-crafting my HTML pages with Pico. I also had accounts on Geocities and Tripod in their heyday and dabbled with hosting pages on those services.

My suitemate next door would alternately blare out Tupac and Metallica at ear-splitting volumes at all hours of the day and night. I learned how to use graphics software (Paint Shop Pro and the Microsoft Animated GIF tool, if I recall correctly) so I could harass him by emailing lewd doctored images of Tupac every day.

I was still really into cars at the time, and was a Chevy partisan. I still drive the Chevy truck my parents bought me as a sort of high school graduation present, though it’s starting to wheeze a little after 12 years. I sat around and drew sketches of trucks, oblivious enough of what a dork this made me that my roommate freshman year had an intervention and asked me to stop doing that because “he wanted me to actually get laid.”

I mention this because I also spent a lot of time that year getting into pointless arguments with people who knew a lot more about cars than I did on a Ford vs. Chevy message board.

In another demonstration of sound judgment, I almost got kicked off the network entirely at one point for bulk e-mailing several hundred students at random after a football game. I don’t remember what I was complaining about, but it rightfully pissed a lot of people off that I did this.

Our dorm room was networked together, and we played lots of Quake, Terminator and Grand Theft Auto multiplayer games. We also shared files, including thousands of MP3s. If you stood around our dorm in the afternoon, you wouldn’t have to wait long to hear the “Winamp: it really kicks the llama’s ass” sound coming from one room or another.

I’d imagine I did some school work at some point. ICQ was all the rage with the kids.

And of course, there was porn. Wow, did I ever look at a lot of porn that year.

Working for my mom’s company on breaks during college

Another formative set of experiences in my early days on the Internet was when my mom hired me on a couple of occasions to help put together a new web site and marketing materials for her company.

It worked out well both ways, because she paid me less than half of what she would have paid an agency, which was still a lot of money to me at the time. I got to learn how to do a lot of things on the job as I needed to do them. And if I do say so myself, the work turned out pretty darn decent given my experience level.

Alas, the company and the web site no longer exist, though I have a back-up copy of the site on my hard drive.

Internship with Kinetic Design

The timeline in college is a little hazy for me now which is why I’m grouping these by experience rather than by exact year. After either my freshman or sophomore year of college I landed an internship with a small web development firm called Kinetic Design (now doing business as Cool Dog Interactive). They happened to share space with an advertising agency I interviewed for an internship with, and the ad agency took one look at my resumé and thought I’d be better off next door.

Of course, Kinetic Design wasn’t terribly impressed with my resumé either, so it’s a wonder I got that gig at all. I’m assuming they were desperate to hire someone. I ended up doing okay there, even though I don’t think they were ever totally comfortable with me or vice versa.

I got my first experience working on big corporate accounts here, and also had my first experience with doing all my work on a Mac. They had those green G3 towers that were cutting edge at the time. They were nice people and I hope they’re doing well, even if we weren’t the best fit at the time.

The rest of college (1998-2002)

During the remaining years of school, I continued to dabble and tinker with a lot of things.

I mentioned ICQ earlier. In what seems sort of an odd phenomenon now, I and other people I knew would sit around and message people at random, not knowing their geography or much else about them. I even took a trip to North Carolina to meet one girl I had talked to on ICQ. I was nervous, and it turned out as awkwardly as stereotypes tell you a meeting like that should turn out.

Over a Christmas break, I built a better computer and started to get into the hardware side more. My roommate one year had a job doing IT at a hospital, and had access to all sorts of computer parts. I built a file server out of an array of old cheap hard drives, my Pentium 75, and a pirated copy of Windows 2000 Server edition.

I worked in the UT computer lab for several years, learning a little here and there when trying to answer people’s questions, but mostly using the time to do school work or play Dope Wars.

My last couple of years, I got an actual job as webmaster of Rocky Top Books, an off-campus book store. The parent company Nebraska Books had store software, and someone was needed to do some basic skinning and to upload product photos.

The photos I took and uploaded were called out at a corporate meeting as examples of how to do them the right way, which secretly made me a little proud even though we all made a big show of talking about how much we hated the parent company. Little or none of the work I did is reflected on the current web site, but when I was in Knoxville last year I saw the delivery truck still has the decals I designed on it.

I also worked briefly for an ill-fated concert promotion company along with Furious D. I designed a couple of web sites, got drunk with some sketchy people, and got into some free concerts. There were two things I actually learned that were useful to me though, both having to do with clients we tried to get but didn’t land.

The first was when the manager of a famous recording artist called us about an estimate for web site development. I was busy with school work and took too long to get back to them, and by then they weren’t interested. So lesson one was a very basic principle of customer service that was later reiterated during my stint at Best Buy: even if you can’t help someone right away, acknowledge them and tell them you’ll help them soon.

The second was when the president of the company (one of the aforementioned sketchy characters) was pitching web development services to a band, and then without warning gave the floor up to me. We had vague ideas about what we wanted to sell — web sites, promotional video packages, and probably some other web-related services to go along with traditional concert promotion. What we didn’t have were package deals and price lists set up. So I learned that just telling someone “we can do anything you want us to do” doesn’t fly. They were coming to me because they have no clue what they want, so it’s my job to tell them and to let them argue with me if they think I’m wrong.

2003

This was somewhat of a down period online for me. I had a job as a newspaper writer, and most of my time spent online was reading news, researching stories, and emailing people.

I met Jen at a Howard Dean meet-up I was covering for the newspaper. This was one of my first experiences being around online activism. Truthfully, the meet-up itself wasn’t very impressive. It was two hours of people sitting around talking about how great Howard Dean was and maybe fifteen minutes of actual productive work (writing letters to people).

Jen and I went and played Trivial Pursuit at some Dean kids’ apartment after, which probably wasn’t the best idea in retrospect.

Late 2003

I quit my newspaper job around October of that year (that’s a whole other story for another time), and was drifting, trying to plot my next career move after a couple of interviews I’d lined up didn’t work out. I had a background in web development, a degree in English and journalism, and some work experience in both, and wasn’t sure at the time that I really wanted to do either one. The first few months at the newspaper was some of the most fun I’ve had at a job, followed by the worst experience I’ve ever had with an employer during the last few months.

I was content to bide my time while I plotted, so I looked for temp work doing mindless office tasks. I also immersed myself in a couple of web sites: Zoetrope and Newgrounds.

In college, I had a lot of fun in a fiction writing class where we peer reviewed each other’s stories. Zoetrope was a site for writers to post their work and review other people’s work. It was ahead of its time, and had a neat system that forced you to review five other stories before you were allowed to post your own work. It was interesting to get some honest criticism of some pieces I had written years before, and to randomly stumble on work from people at different stages in their craft (some rank amateurs, some who could have been published in literary journals, and many in-between).

Newgrounds was one of the first experiences I had that I would think of as homegrown media, even though several before it probably qualified. It’s a site that hosts user-posted Flash cartoons and allows people to rate them. It was way ahead of its time in that it had a rating system like you see on Digg now that actually worked pretty well. Much of what was on there was terrible, but it was gratifying to stumble on something creative that not many other people had seen. I never got around to posting my own cartoons there, but I rated and reviewed hundreds.

Then I decided to start a blog.

Yaarr, tis me blog!

I still have an archive of this up. The thing that strikes me about the writing is how angsty and juvenile it reads now, even though it wasn’t really all that long ago. I cringe when I read it the way I do when I read comments in my high school yearbooks. But I’m also glad there’s a record of my thoughts at the time.

I started it in December 2003, hosting it on Earthlink webspace using Blogger at first, and moving it to my own domain using WordPress not long after. I still had an itch to follow and write about news and politics that the newspaper somehow had managed not to stifle, but also wanted to mix in personal stories, tech stuff and sports here and there. I didn’t want to write for a living at the time, so I created a theme with the idea that no one would take it seriously. My annual NCAA Picks contest goes all the way back to that blog.

There probably weren’t more than a dozen Atlanta-based blogs at that point, at least that I knew of. Some of the people who were writing at the time are still my good friends now; others I’ve lost contact with.

We were all pretty crushed by the 2004 election. I wasn’t a partisan Democrat, but it didn’t take a partisan to recognize that George W. Bush was a train wreck of a president.

This led to a failed attempt to put together a political action committee among a group of bloggers and some friends. It was a great experience because so many things went so wrong so quickly that we got a lot of education out of it without it costing us much more than a little time.

At the same time as we were failing at creating a PAC, I grew disillusioned with that blog and started another one.

Radical Georgia Moderate

My original idea was to write a blog focused entirely on Georgia politics, mixing Cobb County politics with state politics. It didn’t take me long to want to occasionally divert my attention from that however, and from a content standpoint it eventually wasn’t a whole lot different from my first blog: politics, with occasional sports and personal stories and tech notes thrown in when I got bored with politics.

It was marginally less angsty than the first blog, though in the first couple of years I didn’t filter much at all. Several lame blog dramas played out in front of an audience; tantrums and rants were not uncommon; tempers flared; egos were bruised; enemies were made. My blogging to that point had been rooted in a lot of negativity.

And while it’s not how I choose to interact with people or view the world now, I don’t regret and wouldn’t apologize for writing a word of it.

Despite all that negativity, much awesomeness came from that blog. I met more friends, one of whom (Joeventures) found me some interesting part-time work that helped me eventually dig myself out of the professional rut I was in. And of course, I met Amber after we started commenting on each other’s blogs. The job I have now, which is in most ways the best job I’ve ever had, can also be traced back to that blog.

I eventually shuttered it because I got to a place in my life where I didn’t want to dwell in negativity. Politics (and media for that matter) can be a grimy, scum-ridden place that makes me sad and angry when I spend too much time thinking about it. So I don’t, beyond continuing to read just enough that I’m not uninformed when I vote.

One other good experience that came from that was Amber and I started…

The Georgia Podcast Network

We started the podcast site right at the peak of the hype surrounding podcasting. The funny thing about podcasting is it’s never stopped growing and is more popular than ever, but the hype machine has moved on to other things.

I continue to enjoy maintaining the site and posting there because it gives me a more positive outlet than the other sites I’d made before gave me. Having to look someone in the eye when you speak with them (as we do for almost all our interviews on Mostly ITP) causes both interviewer and interviewee to take a more civil, thoughtful tone I think.

The momentum we had from the launch of this site in 2006 helped Amber put together the first PodCamp Atlanta, which was only the second event of its kind in Atlanta (the first SoCon happened just a few weeks prior). Now barely a month passes in this town without a similar event happening, and I think Amber deserves some credit for being on the forefront of that.

Still, for a while, I was a little disappointed in the back of my mind that the site hasn’t picked up more steam than it has. Sure, we’ve gotten a couple of Best of Atlanta awards, and I’m not saying that isn’t nice. But I guess it seemed to me that it could have been more than it is. Our traffic is only a little higher now than it was a year or so ago, so it’s not growing at a breakneck speed. Barely anyone leaves comments. We get new podcasts on there, but others seem to stop posting at about the same pace.

Ultimately, it’s totally been worth it to have a pretense to speak with people that are interesting to me.

This place and Web Two-Point-Oh

I don’t seem to have as much energy for blogging these days, the occasional long ranty post that seems to come out of nowhere notwithstanding.

Some of that can probably be attributed to all the Web 2.0 whizbangs that take up my time. I have a list of many of them in sidebar.

Part of it is that I’m in a happier place now than I’ve ever been really, and it’s harder for me to maintain the energy to write something reflective every day if I’m not pissed off.

A lot of the daily commenting chatter that had been happening on my blog and the blogs I read and commented on regularly has moved to Facebook and Twitter. I sort of like that I have to confine my negative thoughts to 140 characters now.

And of course, having adult responsibilities like a job and a lawn to mow get in the way of blogging.

But none of that should be read to mean that I’m any less enthusiastic about the concept of putting yourself out there online. The big thing I take from reading back on all this is that none of it was a waste of time, despite some people’s scoffs and “friendly” advice. On the whole I’ve taken out as much as I’ve put into it, and probably more.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 11:42 am. It was tagged amber, autobiography, computers, gdgf, geekery, History, internet, newgrounds, personal history, radical georgia moderate, yaaarr tis me blog, zoetrope. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.