View From The Porch: The distant past of last week.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

The distant past of last week.

Brian J. Noggle links to the dusty corridors of his website from the previous millennium, with its essays and columns preserved under cobweb-covered tarpaulins.

My online footprint at the time was far less hip, being on AOL, and all...

35 comments:

Scout26 said...: You do realize that none of the guys here will read the words, they will only look at the pictures.

(Like the "bikini picture".); 9:41 AM, March 11, 2014
Reno Sepulveda said...: VHS movies and Diablo! Pretty damn hip.; 9:58 AM, March 11, 2014
Robert said...: With a profile like that, I'm sure your email inbox was a constant flood.; 10:04 AM, March 11, 2014
Critter said...: Boinnnng!; 10:31 AM, March 11, 2014
staghounds said...: I wish I had a few of my old pieces back from the days of WhoIs and the Misanthropic Bitch.; 10:47 AM, March 11, 2014
Pakkinpoppa said...: I sense you have a joy of reading, not merely due to the mention of it eleventy times.

The photo is purty nice too.

Anybody who didn't read the first few lines probably sent you a date request I would imagine.

I wish to subscribe to your newsletter, to end my worry about grape juice stains in my carpet. Having a 4 year old...I imagine that's an inevitability.; 10:53 AM, March 11, 2014
Keith said...: Well this certainly explains that 1911 you carried for so many years.; 11:02 AM, March 11, 2014
Weer'd Beard said...: Man, if I was a detective in a Hammett/Chandler/ Retro Robert Parker novel, and you in that picture walked into my office, I knew I'd be clubbed with a sap sometime in the next week....; 11:05 AM, March 11, 2014
Scott J said...: I wish I was one tenth as cool as you in my early days.

I made an attempt at an "all about me" website back in the latter half of the 90's.

I lost interest for awhile then went back to visit it around the turn of this century and was crushed at its lameness.

Thankfully I believe all that content died with Mindspring.com.; 11:22 AM, March 11, 2014
Charlie Foxtrot said...: Very Kim Carnes.

Off to YouTube for a Bette Davis Eyes fix.; 11:38 AM, March 11, 2014
Mike_C said...: Anybody who didn't read the first few lines probably sent you a date request I would imagine.
As if that would be a deterrent. "Hah, eight years? My lifelike authentic alpaca-hair chest toupee, vulgar gold medallion and Pontiac Fiero with the big aftermarket spoiler on the back will win her little heart. She'll have to stop all that reading if she's gonna get me my beers though."

Nice photographs, very Film Nawh-ish. But the right justification is (waah!) painful.; 11:40 AM, March 11, 2014
Cincinnatus said...: Style, you has it.; 11:51 AM, March 11, 2014
Ancient Woodsman said...: Neat imagery. Add in that .32 Safety Hammerless from above to the black & white photos, perhaps a Gibson in one hand, and an FDR-type cigarette holder, and you'd just about have stepped out of an evening engagement with William Powell & Myrna Loy.; 12:00 PM, March 11, 2014
Joseph said...: I was thinking "Scully" myself.

I wonder what that Tam would think of today's Tam?

These thoughts occur to me RE: myself sometimes, "what would the 25yo Joe think of the 45yo Joe?" Aside from "DUDE! What happened?!" LOL; 12:05 PM, March 11, 2014
Anonymous said...: I made the mistake of clicking on the "home, and start the engine!" page. (The media player that Iceweasel currently likes to fire up for whatever media type that is has a distressing tendency to set the volume to 100% when invoked by the browser.)
A moment later, my office was full of inquisitive felines.; 1:25 PM, March 11, 2014
Windy Wilson said...: You should know that your theories regarding antique farm machinery did in fact enable me to remove CONCORD grape juice stains from white shag carpet (That was the real proof, the white grape juice stains were easy).; 1:33 PM, March 11, 2014
Anonymous said...: The site is oddly prescient of Tumblr blogs today. Matter of fact, except for the lack of dancing GIFs, I thought it was rehosted on Tumblr.

Am I the only guy who looks at the site template and is not looking for a rumored bikini shot, though?; 1:36 PM, March 11, 2014
Tam said...: What cracks me up is that the screen cap that was full-screen on my Pentium 133's 15" CRT takes up less than a quarter of the screen real estate on this Surface RT.; 1:39 PM, March 11, 2014
Chuck Pergiel said...: Weer'd Beard +1; 2:43 PM, March 11, 2014
Matt G said...: Yeah, and you prol'ly had that Pentium 133's CRT cranked up to almost full res, with a gamer video card that could handle it. (Remember when we worried about upping the resolutions on monitors because we could hurt 'em?)

I remember reading that AOL profile back in 2000, to see what was what with this newly active gunchick that was posting at TheFiringLine. Most folk didn't have a personal home page back then, and when they did, it was typically either GeoCities or the off-the-shelf AOL product (AOL's arrow was still pointing up, back then, but it was just about at the tipping point.).

Today's kids won't get just How. Frickin'. Cool. those clickable links and graphics were, back in Y2K and the year preceding it. It was as much about the style as the content of the page that said something to readers. 14 years later, it still looks dang good.; 2:49 PM, March 11, 2014
CGHill said...: I think I was exactly one-tenth that cool in those days, though I never came close to a twentieth of the pulchritude.; 3:43 PM, March 11, 2014
NotClauswitz said...: Too bad you never made it over to rec.motorcycles.dirt - there was a lot of fun goin' on in certain corners of Usenet the late 90's.; 4:28 PM, March 11, 2014
Will said...: Racing!
Local, state, national? Using your street bike, or other?

I encouraged the serious women riders I knew to get some track time, but none followed through. There were several female racers in the local club, including one who was deaf.
There was one AMA racer who even ran the same bike as I did (Moto Guzzi). She was good. She was based in Georgia, IIRC, 80's. Won Daytona Heavy Twins (BoTT).; 4:33 PM, March 11, 2014
Cincinnatus said...: Weer'd Beard for the win.; 5:03 PM, March 11, 2014
rickn8or said...: Ah, nostalgia.

Love the pics, especially the one of your on the right looking all meditative. My first thought was "Little Orphan Annie Gone Rogue."; 5:18 PM, March 11, 2014
Buzz said...: In a genre befitting the pic: Nice gams!

(impressive relative calf girth for a 5' 12" frame); 6:37 PM, March 11, 2014
Buzz said...: Anonymous: I ran across the infamous bikini pic by accident when googling "books bikes" because I was too damned lazy to type the whole address on a new surfing device.

While Tam was and still is a sight to behold, I'm lucky I didn't meet her in my younger days, because it would have been hell on my brunette streak. Her interests, humor and snark mastery would have halt-scratched the proverbial spinning vinyl in my head, regardless of the of hair color.
Now, I'm just an old married dad that finds great entertainment in her observations.; 7:05 PM, March 11, 2014
Anonymous said...: I remember the profile from links off the old TFL. It was impressive. Congrats on your many successful years on the web.; 9:29 PM, March 11, 2014
The Freeholder said...: AOL? What on earth possessed you to venture into that...place? Yick!; 9:31 PM, March 11, 2014
Anonymous said...: Oh wow, that font.; 10:02 PM, March 11, 2014
Anonymous said...: Heroes of Might and Magic III!!!!

Oh, if only I could count the hours spent playing hotseat games with 6 other friends....; 12:26 AM, March 12, 2014
Kristophr said...: AOL was just about all there was that was worth a crap back then, Freeholder.

Pre-internet-for-the-masses days.

You either had a BBS account, and faked it with fido-net, or you logged your Mac into AOL. Or you were one of those poor 'tards on Prodigy.

AOL didn't get a bad rep until much later, when new computer users got handed AOL cds like confetti, and AOL added USENET newsgroups to its "rooms", causing Eternal September ( shudder ).; 3:22 AM, March 12, 2014
Gewehr98 said...: Peabody's Wayback Machine!; 9:06 AM, March 12, 2014
ASM826 said...: Can you post the opinions that will get grape juice stains out of white carpet? I don't know about the rest of those problems, but that one would be really useful.; 10:26 AM, March 12, 2014
Sean said...: That photo is my mental image of how Dagny Taggart looked when I read Atlas Shrugged back in high school. Quite lovely.; 11:04 PM, March 13, 2014