I went to a presentation at the Computer History Museum called Dialed-in: The Prehistory of Social Media.

The event was a discussion with Kevin Driscoll, author of "The Modem world: a Prehistory of Social Media", and danah boyd, author of "It's Complicated".

The event talked a bit about the history of BBSes and contrasted current social networks with the local communities that sprouted up around BBSing.

To me, in a nutshell, BBSing was an exclusive group - not many people had computers, and the onus was on a caller or sysop to buy a modem, get a phone line (or share a line and risk the hazards of doing so...), find terminal software and build a BBS list.

The panel could have been an open discussion - I'm sure many of the people in the crowd were sysops at one time, or even current sysops. Thankfully, they dodged a bullet by avoiding the sys-op/sise-op wars of the 1990s.

I went with 3 sysops/friends of mine from the golden-age of BBSing. Taipan Enigma and Dr. Strangelove started NIRVANAnet(tm), and Zardoz and I were some of the first sysops to join the nascent network. We joked that the panelists missed out on the culture that they were observing.

It was good seeing people I'd spent the 90s conversing with, both online and in person at the user meetups we'd arrange. The idea of going out for beers afterwards was suggested, but I had an hour drive, early work days ahead, babysitters to let go, and so on. Quite unlike the old days when a couple of nights out ended up with staying up all night, posting on BBSes, greasy-spoon diner breakfasts, and going home to nurse a hangover.

I'm taking a one month break from Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. I'm going to stick with Mastadon for the time being, as it seems unadulterated by algorithms and company marketing teams - it's just interesting people at this point.

Reddit, I may browse -- there are a couple of interesting subreddits I read for technical info and advice. We'll see.

I need to find an RSS feed for news, I realized that I get most of my news from Twitter these days.

I realized that my blog and domain (kataan.org) are 25 years old today! I started a project to move the older items from a text archive (downloaded from blogger, remember them?) into my Wordpress database. I hadn't realized that with blogger, I used it like Twitter as a microblog - there are some days where I posted multiple times a day, on different trains of thought.

1999 was a crazy, interesting time.

I was working in the middle of the first dot-com boom, right in the center of it all. I quit my job at a gaming company for a jump in responsibility and a share of a streaming music startup right in the middle of the Napster mess. I was in the meeting on business deals where we danced around money, because no one was sure who should be paying whom. Do we pay for exposure, or do they pay for content?

There were 3 search engine companies within a couple of blocks of me. Hotwired became the cool new site. Friends at web companies were charging clients like they were attorneys, getting them a presence on that web thing that they didn't understand.

South Park, a little green oasis in the SOMA area of San Francisco became the center of "Multimedia Gulch". Companies that had been focused on CD multimedia moved to web design and creative services.

It all went a little too far. fuckedcompany.com documented some of the excesses, like flake.com, a portal for breakfast cereal lovers, and a company down the street that had their coming out party on a Tuesday and closed the doors on a Thursday.

[oh, the parties - it seemed like someone was getting a round of funding and throwing a party in their converted warehouse/sweatshop space. One of the guys at my startup hosted an email list with all of the "private" parties going on almost nightly in SOMA. The recyclers in the area had a field day with collecting empty beer cans and bottles...]

By mid 2001, the money had started drying up, Aeron chairs and office furniture were available at bargain prices from closed-door dot-coms. 9/11 ended the boom once and for all.

A friend of mine, a San Francisco native, went through his address list in 2002 and realized that two thirds of his contacts had left the city as quickly as they'd come a few years back.

But, it was a good time while it lasted.

Looking at how this blog is shaping up, it reminds me of my first iteration of a blog, back when I was consulting and shooting way too much film.

I found it...

20 years ago, a kind of daily journal of things I found significant, trivial goings-on, photos I'd shot while working in San Francisco and things I wanted to save in Google's cache lest they dissapear.

Man, that was a long time ago - a whole life ago. Most of the photos are of places that no longer exist, old architecture replaced with new.

I like the idea of supporting alternative "smol web" protocols. While part of me likes sticking with low-tech HTML (minimal use of CSS, no scripts, static content), someone on the BBS brought up an interesting point - you still need to use a modern browser for security's sake, and that opens up all sorts of privacy issues - not to mention they're overkill for rendering basic HTML.

I'd love to find a lightweight, supported browser that didn't support any of the bloat that's been added over the years.

Gemini is nice, the markup is simple, but someone complained that it's SSL only. I don't see that as much of an issue, I prefer encrypting everything to make the target data pool larger. Encrypt your shopping list.

That leaves us with Gopher. The markup is a little more difficult, although it would come back to me after decades. It's not encrypted, not a big deal given the content (although, see my previous comment...). When Mozilla took gopher support out of Firefox, I thought that would be the end of it, but I found a Gopher client for Windows - and now I found Lagrange, a cross-platform browser that does Gopher and Gemini, I'm quite happy.

If only it would support basic HTML, I'd have a perfect SMOL WEB browser...

I took a quiet afternoon alone recently to do some homelab housecleaning. Breaking one of my primary rules of homelabbing (don't replace it if it ain't broke) I replaced an 8 port gigabit ethernet switch (saved from a dumpster at work when it wouldn't support 802.1x) with a smart switch that supports VLANs (on sale for 40% off).

Put my Linksys router back in place, running OpenWRT. My plan is to set up a VLAN for a guest/IoT network, a separate VLAN for PCs and media servers and another VLAN for my test Windows network.

After setting all this up, out came the canned air. My NAS sucks in dust like no one's business, so I took it offline, took the drives out and blasted the dust out of it. It's much quieter now.

Then, I replaced my hodgepodge of network cables, all different colors and all too long, with shorter black cables for the lab and color coded cables for uplink to my switches.

Took the back off of my "server", a Lenovo Thinkpad. Replaced the thermal paste and blew the dust out.

After all that, my UPS started beeping and flashing a REPLACE BATTERY warning. Got a new battery in a couple of days later, and APC has a battery recycling program, which means one less dead hardware item lying around.

For a sysadmin, this was a relaxing day.

One thing I've realized with blosxom - posts are displayed based on their modified date, not their created date. So, if I find a typo and correct it, the post goes to the top of the display. Looking at man (1) touch, I can pass a date string to the command and reset the modified date, but that seems overly complicated.

Better to leave posts as-is, errors and all. This isn't meant to be polished, by any means.

I found my old Flickr account from the 2000s with 18 pages worth of photos. Going back through them was a nostalgia trip - I shot a lot of film in the early 2000s, I'd discovered lomography and was working in a subject-rich environment, San Francisco. It was a town going through a lot of change, and some of the buildings I captured were gone in the following weeks and months.

There's a lot to be said for pocketable cameras. With a LOMO, I'd leave the focus at 8-10 feet and in sunny weather (or shooting with ASA 400 film), you'd probably get your subject in focus. Reach in your pocket, shoot, repeat. I've been shooting again with an old Canon digital pocket camera, but it's not quite the same.

With my phone I need to pull it out, unlock it, press the camera app, wait for it to load, then sight and shoot. It's just not the same.