One Hell of a Year

Friday, October 1, 1999

Happy Birthday, Website!

Exactly one year ago today, this website went live. I remember working well into the night writing the core pages, and then leaving work early the next day to come home and work some more. Then, at the end of the afternoon, I sat back, had a beer, and watching the server log, relishing every hit and doing DNS lookups to see who was coming to visit. It was one hell of a day.

Over the past twelve months, this website has grown, and I've grown with it. There have been the usual ups and downs. Some weeks I spent an inordinate amount of time working on it — tweaking the design, looking for interesting things to link to — and other weeks I would just sit back and ignore it. But in the main, this website has become a bigger part of the way I express myself to the world, and much of the work I've done on the backend has been in search of ways to make it easier for me to do just that, at any time, and from any place with a PC and a phone line.

What's Next

I was hoping to be able to debut a new feature here today, but it didn't work out. The feature was a discussion group — an online bulletin board where anyone could come by and post their thoughts or links, where real conversations could take place. Up til now, this website has been all about me in isolation. But I'm not an isolated person — I live in the context of other people — and I want to open up this part of my world to them as well.

Also on the horizon is a site reorganization. The news page is now the most central part of the site; it should the first page you see when you come here. There are also a lot of pages that have been added in a rather haphazard way and need to be organized in a more meaningful way. A redesign in a couple of months is also a distinct possibility. Finally, it has been a long time since I last wrote one of these notes; I need to do more writing here.

A Time to Reflect

As much as anniversaries cause you to look to the future, they also tend to make one reflect on the past. Over the last few days, after I realized that this day was coming, I thought that it might be time for a reassessment. So, in the tradition of Hollywood:

The Good: I work at a job that I love, and the first job I've had that I love for what it is in itself. In the past, I've had some pretty crappy jobs, and others that I've only viewed as a stepping stone to something better down the road. Now, I'm not at the end of the road (and I hope I never will be), but I'm far enough so that I know that what I'm doing now is what I want to keep doing for a good long while.

The Bad: Two months ago my mother died. From the perspective of the day-to-day, I'm over it now, but in a larger sense, I'll never be over it. Last night I talked to my father, and he read a memorial to my mother that had just appear in our swim club's newsletter. As he went on, I found myself crying for the first time in weeks; I feel the sorrow even now as I write about it. But while my mother won't be here to see my future accomplishments, I'm glad she was here to see me make the turn towards becoming who I want to be.

The Ugly: That would, um, be my personal life. Gregory Corso's question — "Should I get married, should I be good?" — is now my question. That in itself is a novel development, but that hasn't seemed to help me relationship-wise. I fell madly in love at the start of the year, and then she moved away, and then farther away because of her job. It's over. So now it's come down to this: during the week I work; during the weekend I work; and when I'm not working I'm not doing much. Put this on the list for things to work on in the future — get a life!

So on that note, off to make dinner…