I shut down my websites a couple of weeks ago. I have had an online presence for almost 30 years. If you count Bulletin Board Systems, I have been posting for about 40 years. The reason that I no longer have a website and blogs is that there doesn’t seem to be a point to it anymore. If I have anything to say, I can post on social media. If I have a concept that is a little longer or complicated, I can use Substack.
Here is a brief history of my online action.
I bought an IBM PC from a friend I knew at IBM at the IBM employee price of $450. It was the old portable (luggable) PC. I huge PC in a box with a handle. I wrote lots of words and programs on that computer and I wore the letters off the keyboard. I have memories of dragging it into commuter jets on my way to Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles. It fit in the overhead, but to the exclusion of anyone else. I still have it and a backup in the basement.
I had a modem and I connected to BBS sites around the county and downloaded software. I joined in on message threads, and I have found my name in old archives where I would discuss programming issues.
My shareware programs and discussions caught the eye of someone at a book publisher and I was hired to help with a series of books. They sent me an AOL diskette in the late 1990s and gave me a free account. AOL had an internet gateway and I could use AOL to access web pages, which was a new experience and much better that BBS discussions. I kept that free account for about ten years.
AOL had a blog application called Blogger and that’s where I started blogging. In a time when there weren’t that many people on the internet, I had thousands of views. You could put a little snippet of code on your pages and it would show the page views.
I called that first blog Keith Graham’s Wanderings.
When Google bought Blogger, I followed along. By then I worked at corporations that brought the internet to my desk, and it wasn’t until years later that I had anything but dial-up internet in my house.
The oldest blog post in my archives is from 2003. This is probably the oldest Google Blogger entry. I do not have the blog posts from AOL. It might be interesting if I could find the old AOL posts. I probably have it on a CD or hard disk.
I stayed on blogger until I bought the CTHREEPO.COM domain and I installed WordPress on one of the new hosting services. I stayed with WordPress for the next 20 years. I created JT30.COM, a very popular harmonica website and CTHREEPO.COM had a few thousand readers for every post. I was successful. I briefly ran a Science Fiction Zine, and by the time MySpace and then Facebook pushed out blogging, I had been widely read, and people knew my name. I used to make several hundred dollars a month hosting ads until Google cut the rates on Adsense ads and it was a waste of time to clutter up the websites with them.
I could have been an influencer on FB, but it never occurred to me that there was a way to make money that way. I went the other way. To be a FB friend of mine, I must have actually met you in real life. I limit my list of friends to about 35.
A few years ago, I installed WAMP on an old windows machine that I inherited. WAMP is Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP. You can install the whole environment for running WordPress in one installation. I googled how to get HTTP and HTTPS through my cable company and into my box. I have lots of experience with networking and programming and it was not that difficult. I stopped paying $20 a month for hosting and had only to pay a little for the electric bill to keep my old Windows server going. I installed all of my domains and they ran in the spare room where I keep my computer junk.
This Spring, my cable company started to crap out on a regular basis. The TV and internet died for a few hours every few days. I would reboot my router and modem at least twice a day. No amount of complaining helped.
I read up on 5G home internet. I have been suspicious of this because it is basically a cell phone in a box. My phone usually uses WiFi, but when the cable dies, I have to use cell tower data, and sometimes that is problematic. It couldn’t be worse than my cable company, so I started to experiment. That journey will be documented in a very technical article, as soon as things settle down.
I tried Verizon 5G Home Internet, but it was as flaky as the cable company. I am suspicious that the cable company uses Verizon. I switched over to T-Mobile 5G Home Internet and so far it has been rock solid.
The trouble with T-Mobile is that hosting my websites is ridiculously complicated. I have to somehow tunnel the web traffic through the T-Mobile system. This is something that I am not sure about, yet. I may write up the steps, but I doubt if anyone cares.
It was far simpler to just give up on my websites. I created a rule on CloudFlare.com to redirect my domains (all of them) to my LinkTree site. Now if you type in CTHREEPO.COM or JT30.COM you get nicely formatted links to Amazon so you can buy my books.
The story isn’t over, yet. I found a free service that lets you sneak through the T-Mobile internet to load my websites. I have to ponder this. Is it something that I can do? Is it something that I want to do?
Someone called me from the cable company and they want to give me free service for six months plus $350 and other perks. Too little, too late.
These are my first two Blogger posts from 2003. They are very dry, and I had to fix the broken link. At least I know where I was in 2003.
First Post on Wanderings
This is the home base for the blogger. We’ll see how far we get with this.
DNA computing
I have thought long about biological computing. DNA computing seems too slow for the Terra-Flop crowd, but this one describes DNA which uses computing sections to treat diseases in an algorithmic way. Very cool!
sacbee.com — AP State Wire News — Researchers find logic machines in biology
What I would like to see is a molecular level monostable vibrator circuit (flip-flop) which could be the basis for a molar computer.
I would think that a small molecule in a crystal array with 1) two stable states, 2) a way to fip the states and 3) a quick way to query the states would be a very fast way to store data a million times more dense than any magnetic or solid state array.
I would guess that it would be like the old magnetic core. A two signals could be used to query a 2D location. The signals themselves would generate a change in state all along the path, where two signals met the state would not change and a slightly higher impedance would be measurable. The system would have to reset itself back to original state by sending the two signals separately and the target spot would be in an inverse state. (This is way too hard to explain without diagrams.)
Anyway, I am waiting to see if someone is actually doing this.
The only drawback is that the system will generate heat so that whatever molecule is used will have to be resistant to going fut when the current goes up.