Dear lovely new neighbors,

I, along with the majority of Julliard tenants in this complex, appreciate the fact that you enjoy music. However — I, along with the majority of tenants living in close proximity to your window and entryway, don’t care to hear Lady Gaga blasted into my apartment.

Love,
Your neighbor

Gmail is down. The Twitterverse is going crazy.

For some reason, I receive Banana Republic emails on both my personal Gmail account and on my university alumni account. One of them gave me a special 20% off offer from Virgin America; the other offered 15% off my purchase in exchange for a credit card application. I wonder what makes one email address better than the other.

I haven’t disappeared completely — I’m still recovering from a week-long trip out West, and hopefully I will soon catch up on posting all my Project365 photos!

As part of his work with Synergy, Rob’s leading a team to Uganda in August to help out Action for Children (AFC). He and Jeff have built up a new beta web application to handle the donations, so why not test it out and support him?

I haven’t been ignoring When Awake! I was away in Hudson Valley all last weekend and sans internet yesterday… so today I’ll continue the last four entries. Rest assured, Project 365 will NOT end at 365.2!

p.s. The entries are backdated to match up with the whole “Project 365″ theme

An admission, of sorts.

As a nerdy little sixth grader mostly known for voracious reading, I first heard about the World Wide Web. And ever since, I’ve been obsessed by the Internet. Back when Earthlink and AOL and Compuserve CDs littered our (snail) mailboxes, I badgered my parents into signing up for as many free trials as possible. I mastered the language spoken by our 14.4k modem and crossed my fingers each time I attempted log-in, praying that I had dialed in when there were ample open slots to connect. I discovered Juno and rejoiced at the free ad-supported email which didn’t require an Internet connection, only a modem. And in the off-months when it wasn’t feasible to access a free month of the Internet in all its visual glory, I dialed into my local library and took advantage of the text-only Lynx browser. To the chagrin of my parents, not only did I release their credit card number to multiple Internet providers of dubious repute, I also tied up our only phone line.

It was around 1995 or 1996 when I discovered Geocities, using the ubiquitous “Hello, World” as my foray into web design. From Geocities, my first CMS was Greymatter, Noah Grey’s wonderful gift to the Internet world. I also dabbled with scribble.nu, Movable Type (before it was a paid service), Expression Engine, Blogger, Livejournal and Xanga. Along the way, I co-founded a small web development shop to pay for summer travel through Europe in college, used the “library” at Barnes and Noble as my personal PHP learning course, and hacked multiple CSS themes to uncover the inner workings of the Wordpress CMS. Although one might think that an experience of this magnitude would lead to a blog greater than a decade old, only the Wayback Machine holds the fragmented remains of my past Internet lives. It somehow seems fitting that on my birthday, 13 or 14 years later, my blog would see rebirth.

I still love the Internet.

And it’s never too late.