So, I was digging around in my filesystem on the laptop here yesterday, and stumbled upon some scary artifacts of the days when I was a bit more, um, active as a blogger (before anyone knew to call it that) and had lots of fun with an ad banner rotator I wrote; I asked some friends to submit banners for their sites and built some banners for them to stick on their sites, too. I still like the "negative forces have value" tagline. I'd completely forgotten about that. How young and brash we were, how utterly convinced that we were pioneers.
The "Boring Gallery" was this collection of Web sites that had the then-standard "colored bar down left side of screen and white content area" design. Sadly, or not, it's still there, in all its boring glory. For a while, searching on my name returned this page as the first result on Lycos/AltaVista/HotBot/whatever search engine was popular in 1997...
It's amusing to poke through some of those I didn't (and won't) upload; apparently, back then, I considered O'Reilly and Associates, Argus Associates (Lou Rosenfeld did an interview for the site), Perl, Java and the Onion worthy of free advertising on my site, along with hesketh.com and the now-defunct Digital Aspect (where I worked as a consultant for a year after leaving imonics) and Integrated Technical Services, a good chunk of the old imonics IT group (with whom we shared an office).
Heh.
Oh, and to clear up any confusion: the big turd on the modem (yes, a 33.6Kbps US Robotics Sportster - the original animation I did as a "splash page" - remember those? actually had lights that lit up more or less the same way they did on the modem, and in the right order, for a dialup session) is a Buddha, in a position of extreme contemplation. I forget where I got it, but you could still get them (in albeit smaller version) from the Wireless catalog NPR puts out as of ten years ago or so. His head is in his lap. I used to call it the "anxiety Buddha", because he didn't seem too calm to me.
