Departure
5 o'clock, January 20, 2003
Okay; if William Gibson can bite the bullet and start a weblog, I guess I should stop making excuses. (Anyway, it was embarrassing at Conjosé, having to tell Ben Rosenbaum that I didn’t have one.)
This doesn’t come as naturally as it would have a few years ago. In — oh — October of 1995, say, when I was really really excited about this “Internet” thing, it would have been another story, but a few years of working in the industry have burned most of that out of me. Now the whole idea seems vaguely pretentious. If I find my own personal life rather dull, I can only imagine what soporific effect it might have on strangers. And while various people — friends and enemies both — have pointed out that I never have a shortage of opinions, there are plenty of equally opinionated people out there who are much more energetic about their opinions than I am about mine. (You can find links to some of the more interesting ones over at Patrick Nielsen Hayden's Electrolite.)
I expect I’ll get over that — probably about a week after I get over being self-conscious about writing speculative fiction.
So bear with me.
Technical note
Updates may be intermittent for a while; ridiculously, the one place from which I can’t actually access the site is my home network, including the server the site is actually running on — the vagaries of Network Address Translation prevent me from using the external address www.chrononaut.org from my side of the DSL router. I've been running Mozilla off a box in San Francisco using an SSH port-forwarded X session, but that's even slower than this Internet thing was in 1995, and anyway Brandon probably doesn’t appreciate it when I steal all his outgoing bandwidth. Sooner or later I’ll have to set up my own internal DNS server or something, but in the mean time I'll have to brush up on my warchalking.
Also, I’m aware the site looks like crap in Internet Explorer for Windows, and that parts of it look quite odd even in Internet Explorer for Macintosh. It looks great — modulo your graphic design tastes — in Mozilla, honest. :). It also looks pretty decent in Lynx, and in any antique browser that doesn’t even try to support Cascading Style Sheets. Sometime soon I’ll risk the flashbacks and dig out some of that old browser-detection code from my SGI days, and do something about it.
I like the links (esp "pretentious" to your home page) and the wallpaper is no less than nifty.
Now Greg can hijack *your* blog comments!
PS. Love the oh-so-polite demand for email address from the mgt when I first tried to post this!