AOL

Dial-up in the morning
On Friday, my parents came into town. I’ve been terrifically busy since then. Yesterday we did family racquetball, and then down to Pacific Beach, and then to a Baseball game of my 10 year old cousin Michael. After that we went to Mexican food at Marieta’s in Santee. A very busy day, and I got some sun.

Having my parents and sister here has been wonderful. We’ve gotten a chance to do some good and serious talking, and had fun too. I’ve been camped out on the couch of my Grandparents. An odd venue, but it feels like I’m on vacation—staying at the dorm of an old friend.

I woke up early today, and am now doing laundry. Laundry on a Sunday morning is pretty typical for me. But the location today is pretty odd.

My current connection to the internet is a 56k dial-up modem, connected through AOL. My Grandparents have MSIE4 for Windows 98. Checking mail is kind of an adventure. Blogging doubly so.

Things are nice. My sister (and most everyone) is (are) still asleep. My mom is up already, and on a walk. It should be a good day. We intend to go to the Hillcrest Sunday Morning Farmer’s Market and to the Apple Store. More adventures!

Today’s Archaeology: Virtual World

More scrapbooking and archaeolgy. This is the membership card to Virtual World, which for a time in the early to mid 1990’s was a chain of networked game parlours. I remember that in the Pasadena branch they had a Mac there with an irc chat channel open, or was it an AOL chat window? Anyway, that was yet another very early taste of the internet.

Now, it looks like the first time I went into one of these was in 1994. I loved playing Red Planet. Everyone seemed to prefer the Mechwarrior games, but I liked Red Planet – it was a racing game – yes, you could blast your opponents, but you could also win by simply making the most laps. Wonderful game. I’m pretty sure all the machines were Macintoshes too.

As you can see, I used the handle “ArtLung” – which may be my actual earliest use of the term. That makes it roughly 7 1/2 years at least that I’ve been using the name.

What I passed along in April of last year is closer to coming to pass with AOL client version 8.0, according to NewsForge:

Exclusive: AOL embraces Linux and Mozilla, plans to drop MS Explorer

So, if you’ve been Mozilla / Netscape6 / Geckophobic, time to step up to the plate and learn to code for the Mozilla rendering engine. And best practice is to code to standards and leave your browserspecific crud behind. There’s a great deal to learn.

Bebe Advertisements Site Updated and Moved.
One of the most searched for things on this site is for “Bebe Ads.” Some time ago I became, well, obsessed about the wonderful photography contained in bebe ads. I’ve added some new ones, notably of Yamila Diaz, Nina Brosh, and Isabeli Fontana. I’ve also given them a home under the “fansite” directory of this domain. I have the larger versions of the ads stored on my free space of Cox.net. I tend to be highly paranoid about bandwidth usage, even though it’s unlikely that I’ll go over the limits set by my host. I had been using my space at members.aol.com, but that got flaky. I’m not sure if it was my content, or what, but at times the site would only work if I used the hometown.aol.com – which adds a frame of advertising. I don’t care enough to investigate this, so I moved it off of AOL entirely.

That new url: http://artlung.com/fansite/bebe/

Book Review from Salon of Dot.con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold:

Once it became possible to float a profitless company on the NASDAQ and, with the proceeds, buy your way to respectability (as AOL did most spectacularly in its purchase of Time Warner), you might feel like a loser for not trying yourself. This dread of being left out, the rise of online trading—especially day trading—and “The Greater Fool theory of investment,” Cassidy contends, became the essential drivers of dot-com mania. (The “greater fool” theory of investments holds that what matters is not the earnings, or performance, of the company you hold stock in, but simply that you can resell its stock to a sucker for a more ridiculous markup than you paid).

Looks worth looking at.

A native version of the AOL client for Mac OS X has been released. I also notice on that page that there are different installers for Windows XP vs. Windows 2000. That’s sort of interesting. Anyway, installed the new AOL client on the iBook here which has OSX on it. Why, you ask? Jenny uses AOL as her primary email, I use it as a tertiary email. Seems no different from the OS8/9 version, but it’s slightly smoother as far as UI goes.