Internet Hijinx
I just helped Lisa for a couple hours with her website development. Where's my grade? What a cheeseball I am....
I've been hashing out ideas for a website of my own. Even considered owning a domain name, so I can be like all those hip computer technicians who mock my need for passwords at work. I am not quite sure what the point of it all would be, but then I keep finding myself pounding away at the keyboard entering another blog entry. It is a creation. It is entertainment I suppose. For me at least. I am not altogether sure a site with some words and pictures is all that unique on the ole World Wide Web. Someday I will get my act together and do something about this though.
Funny story related to the Internet. When I was about entering high school or still in junior high school (around that age, not sure which), I had a friend who was very much interested in computers. He advised me to connect my computer to a telephone line and to call other computers. Just like the movie WarGames I laughed. I thought he was kidding, but he showed me and it worked. So he supplied me with a fistfull of local numbers to try. I was too young to really be doing this, but I went ahead full steam. Sure enough, I could get a dial tone and call computers and they would beep at each other. I don't remember the first site. Nor the second. But somewhere along the line that day I reached a site that prompted for user information before accessing. For some reason, I answered truthfully. Soon, I found I could not exit the site and it was malfunctioning. Instead of doing normal things, I did abnormal -adolescant- things. I began to type repeatedly on my screen comments like "this site sucks" and so forth. I eventually pulled the plug. That same night, as the sun was on the horizon, my sister called me to the telephone. The man whose computer had malfunctioned was on the line, calling the number I had left on his site and asking for me by name. He yelled at me as irate as a computer geek could be and threatened to ban me from all the free sites in the area. I still remember him telling me how much work he put into maintaining a free site and the nerve I had to tell him that it "sucked." I was scared to death and apologized as the man dug in a little more. After the call I ran to the woods and burned the list of phone numbers and swore off this weird computer connection thing. Those were the days before the Internet evolved. I guess maybe I envision myself as that old man now. Fearing some punk will come along and mock all his hard work.
I've been hashing out ideas for a website of my own. Even considered owning a domain name, so I can be like all those hip computer technicians who mock my need for passwords at work. I am not quite sure what the point of it all would be, but then I keep finding myself pounding away at the keyboard entering another blog entry. It is a creation. It is entertainment I suppose. For me at least. I am not altogether sure a site with some words and pictures is all that unique on the ole World Wide Web. Someday I will get my act together and do something about this though.
Funny story related to the Internet. When I was about entering high school or still in junior high school (around that age, not sure which), I had a friend who was very much interested in computers. He advised me to connect my computer to a telephone line and to call other computers. Just like the movie WarGames I laughed. I thought he was kidding, but he showed me and it worked. So he supplied me with a fistfull of local numbers to try. I was too young to really be doing this, but I went ahead full steam. Sure enough, I could get a dial tone and call computers and they would beep at each other. I don't remember the first site. Nor the second. But somewhere along the line that day I reached a site that prompted for user information before accessing. For some reason, I answered truthfully. Soon, I found I could not exit the site and it was malfunctioning. Instead of doing normal things, I did abnormal -adolescant- things. I began to type repeatedly on my screen comments like "this site sucks" and so forth. I eventually pulled the plug. That same night, as the sun was on the horizon, my sister called me to the telephone. The man whose computer had malfunctioned was on the line, calling the number I had left on his site and asking for me by name. He yelled at me as irate as a computer geek could be and threatened to ban me from all the free sites in the area. I still remember him telling me how much work he put into maintaining a free site and the nerve I had to tell him that it "sucked." I was scared to death and apologized as the man dug in a little more. After the call I ran to the woods and burned the list of phone numbers and swore off this weird computer connection thing. Those were the days before the Internet evolved. I guess maybe I envision myself as that old man now. Fearing some punk will come along and mock all his hard work.
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1 Comments:
I remember those local numbers. One of my uncles ran a 'bulletin board' back in the day, and i remember reading a bunch of dirty jokes and stuff like that, white letters on blue screen, when i was probably about ten years old. The thing I will always remember, though, is watching as, very slowly (the lines rolled onto the screen from left to right, top to bottom), pictures of the Jetsons appeared on my screen. Meet George Jetson, Jane his wife, his boy Elroy... All of these figures made out of characters like [ ^ / \ and |. So imagine my surprise when daughter Judy appeared, naked, with a bunch of *s making up her girlie parts... I never thought of my uncle the same way again.
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