Glimmers from the Stone Age

Temporary... oh, so temporary

2012-02-02T22:51:00.000-08:00

Interrupting the previous train of thought... I just posted (elsewhere) a post about ephemera, and how paper seems to have taken over my life. How so, in the day of the grand white screen? Why, oh why, haven't I filed everything in the electronic file bin? Ah! This electronic beast of so-called permanence, it seems, is in itself temporary. Computers crash, websites fade, dashboards disappear, software upgrades, interfaces change, corporations merge. I cannot find my blog, I cannot find my dashboard. My database, wiped out at the drop of a hat or a sneeze, all by some silent, faceless entity, which this moment, perhaps, has decided to merge, or disband, or go bye-bye in whatever form or fashion pleases them; barely a blink, a nod, or an email ~ leaving me and my ephemera to fend for ourselves. But supposing, just supposing, I could trust today's host to be there tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Then I'd still have to digitize my ephemera to save it. Photos, papers, cards, scraps: files cabinets and bins and baskets full: these things, I have. But to scan them, to transcribe them, even to make brief extracts, would take another lifetime or two. So, this Lord of all Human Knowledge, this Information of the big "I," this electronic file cabinet ~ this wonderful, much-touted savior of humanity, the computer, the Internet ~ 'tis all merely ephemera. And so it goes...

Moldy Old Blogs

2012-01-03T19:09:00.000-08:00

Ah, moldy old blog, here am I, wiping a thick layer of dust off of the old blog-orama, and finding, already, changes, changes, changes. Behind the scenes, Google has redone the whole blog interface, and my poor brain, grown crusty like an old, dry sponge, must once again dampen itself with left-brain thoughts and locate the tools which allow me to talk to myself. If I could just reach that oil can... Tin Man... ah, there we go. The rust loosens. I now find that the "post" option, that handy little tool, has morphed to an orange button. And there I had gotten so used to ignoring orange buttons. Funny how the eye sees not that which it would not see. But, the button being found, and as I now look over this confusing mass of changes, I find that I'm going to like this new interface. And so, we progress into 2012...

Content and Page Design

2011-08-24T18:22:00.000-07:00

Content. I had it all planned. My content was to be my artwork. I wanted rows of paintings with descriptions under them. Naturally they were to be presented in nice, tight layouts. (Layouts, I knew, having worked in advertising ~ and having had an interest in page design since I was a kid). I would finally get to use those elegant fonts I loved so much (!) I could show off my graphic design skills. Like everyone else, I still thought of web pages as ~ well, pages. Book pages, magazine pages, that could be designed into layouts that would stay put.

Another Logo

2011-08-20T12:13:00.000-07:00

Naturally, a new web site needed a logo. I was ready for it this time. I'd navigated the learning curve of image technology by cutting my teeth on Bugbones, the little cartoon guy. Southern Muse needed a more serious logo. But I'd been reading up. Banners were the thing. The Web gods had decreed that 468 x 60 pixels was the ideal size for banners (perfect, back then, for the 8" screen). Might as well go that route, they said, 'cause sooner or later you'll want to swap banners with somebody. So I did. And Webmonkey had taught me to do the Gif thing. In playing around with one of my art programs, I'd developed a little flower that turned out surprisingly nice and compact. With a little tweaking and a periwinkle-blue border, that made a nice logo. Also it would be quick, and I was already tiring of making logos for pages that had no content. Might wanna get some content. Just a thought...

The Annals of Southern Muse

Non-Techie: x + y = (Get Me the Hell Outta Here!)

2011-08-18T08:51:00.000-07:00

Starting on the subject of SEO is getting ahead of myself. Back then, I'd never heard of SEO. My biggest worry had been choosing a name, parking a domain, getting a host, and researching InterNIC fees. Seems as if the dreaded InterNIC fees turned out to be about $70, a one-time fee. Not too horrifying, I suppose. The decision to park my domain at Network Solutions, on the other hand, would come back to "bite me in the butt" many times over. Network Solutions' web page may have been a techie haven, but it was a horrible, unnavigable mess to the unitiated (me). Their site wasn't for newbies. It was a geek site through and through. I was used to Yahoo and Angelfire and CuteFTP (which really was cute, after you got over the hump of configuring it to work with your host). These sites were user friendly, despite the learning curve. Apparently I'm the sort of person that "icon-based Internet" was meant for. Network Solutions didn't go in for little blue icons that look like mailboxes. They didn't have names like "angel" and "cute." Network Solutions used terminology from the cold, hard book of IT science. Navigating the N.S. menu was like working my way through a horror-house maze, like solving an algebraic equation without any givens. I hadn't had algebra since ninth grade. My most vivid memory was of Mr. Leonard chewing on his eraser and chuckling as he devised yet another hellacious problem. (Mr. Leonard wrote his own tests. He just made up problems in his head as he went along.) Science wasn't my strong suit, either. In physical-science lab, my job was the hander over, like the head nurse to a surgeon. Someone says, "Hand me a beaker." I say, "Here."

The Annals of Southern Muse

Chicken, Egg, or Southern Muse?

2011-08-16T15:39:00.000-07:00

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? It's a little fuzzy to me as to whether I bought the Southern Muse domain before I found out about the About.com name thing, or after. Miningco had changed to About, Inc. in May of 1999, according to Wikipedia.* I purchased my domain on February 1, 2000. Clearly, About.com was first, but that doesn't mean that I had heard of it back then. Even if Philip had talked to me before I picked out SouthernMuse, I probably wouldn’t have let go of the name. I was already emotionally attached to it by then. At some point, I know that I did begin to think of domain names beginning with “A.” Was I really thinking of buying more domains? If so, avarice was at the heart of it. Tech forums were buzzing with talk about the importance of top placement in search engines, and any time the term SEO popped up, it was accompanied by excited gossip about the possibility of making gazillions of dollars. Big money aside, I would be happy to have my domain pay for itself. When I tested my own placement by performing searches I found that Southern Muse was not exactly at the top of the heap. In searches for "art," or "genealogy," Southern Muse came up about 5,999,999 in the results. I wasn't on page one ~ I wasn't even on 101. How would anybody ever find me?

*"About.com." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 16 Dec 2008, 05:07 UTC. 24 Dec 2008
URI: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=About.com&oldid=258295629

What, alphabetical?!

2011-08-16T15:24:00.000-07:00

Sigh. It seems that, before I had even bought my domain name, the rest of the world was already clued in on a fact that I hadn’t dreamed of: that there’s more to picking a great domain name than just having a name that sounds nice. It's got to be alphabetical. Apparently, alphabetical placement plays a part in the proper selection of a name. Somewhere between the time that I bought SouthernMuse.com and the time that I had to migrate to a new host,* Philip, formerly of MiningCo and now of About.com, told me about the importance of having a domain name that began with "A," or another letter close to the top of the alphabet. Some search engines listed results alphabetically, he said. What a let-down!

*Host migration: yeah, I suffered that indignity, to be discussed later…

The Annals of Southern Muse

HTML Worries

2011-08-15T07:47:00.000-07:00

I must've been feeling pretty cocky when I bought Southern Muse. Just what, in my Angelfire and FTP experience, had led me to believe that I could actually build a site from scratch, without any web-shell tools? Why, little Webmonkey, of course. Angelfire's web shell and directory structure had been difficult to learn and a nightmare to keep up with, but building the pages had been a piece of cake (at least compared to having your feet dipped in hot oil, which was what most of my technology experience had seemed like). Angelfire had provided some simple readymade page layouts (just fill in the links), with blanks for HTML, if you felt so brave and foolhardy ~ and, they gave you the sweet little Webmonkey to tutor you on simple HTML code. I was mighty grateful to that little monkey. He made it seem easy. So easy, in fact, that I now felt like a HTML-writing diva. Thanks to my Angelfire experience, I had learned to upload an image (assuming that I had one) into a directory, and write a bit of HTML code telling the browser to locate and display it. Yeah, by then I knew what a browser was ~ some kind techies among the smarta----s on various forums had filled me in.

Now, for all I can recall at this late date, Icom may have had web-shell tools, they may have had some readymade pages. But by then, I was in control-freak mode. Yessir, I wanted a layout with my own personal style. No ads, no banners, no geeky-looking airbrushed jet streams in the background. That's why I'd bought Southern Muse. I wanted it to be me.

The annals of Southern Muse

Attaching a Domain Name to a Site

2011-08-14T18:27:00.000-07:00

Why did I buy a domain name, when I didn't even have a site plan? I think I know. Leading up the the year 2000, the 'Net world and those who marketed it convinced us that domain names were just plain gonna run out. Here I had the perfect (I thought) domain name, and if I didn't act fast, somebody was gonna grab it right out from under me! So I bought my domain, and what did I get for my money? A blinding white page with a complimentary, ready-made banner, courtesy of Icom, that said, "Under Construction." If configuring an FTP was scary stuff, looking at a $144 "Under Construction" banner and wondering how to point a domain at it was, frankly, terrifying. Now I had to read up on how to make IP no. 999.999.999.999 (or whatever) say "SouthernMuse.com." Yes, you had to make that happen, it didn't do it automatically. Talk about building from the ground up! Who knew? You see, my IP number was assigned by Icom, my page host. My domain name was parked over on another block, at Network Solutions. I was standing in line behind a lot of other HTML dummies, hoping my domain wouldn't be towed. I have no idea whether it would've been as difficult if I'd used the same entity as host and registrar. Too late to look back, and there was no way I would've paid Network Solution's outlandish hosting fees (being now, as I was, expert enough to be bossy). Anyhow... somehow, I managed to point SouthernMuse.com to my blank page. After the usual depressing delay that comes with all server-fed things (two, three days?), my address finally read, "SouthernMuse.com." I had an URL! And a blank-white page. I was very proud.

The Annals of Southern Muse

Southern Muse registered on Feb. 21, 2000

2011-08-14T18:26:00.000-07:00

Now I had my host, but I still needed to register my domain name. I'm a firm believer in getting a thing straight from the horse's mouth, going back to the source. This convoluted reasoning led me to buy my domain name from Network Solutions, "the dot-com people." If nothing else, I figured if N.S. was InterNIC, they must be the authoritative source on InterNIC fees. Nowhere did their terms and conditions mention InterNIC fees (though they were the people who collected them.) Finally there was nothing left to do but take a chance ~ InterNIC fees be damned. Having already chosen my host, Icom, I registered my domain name, southernmuse.com, at Network Solutions on February 21, 2000. I had my dot-com!

The annals of Southern Muse

Dot-Com: The Real Thing

2010-06-29T17:57:00.000-07:00

Tonight on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, one of the questions referenced the 2007 domain-name dispute over the website, keithurban.com. In that suit, Keith Urban, the Australian country singer/artist sued Keith Urban, a New Jersey artist/painter, over the domain name. It seems that the artist had registered his dot-com long before the musician became famous in the U.S. Although the musician claimed that the painter was trying to misrepresent himself, the painter did not claim to be a musician, did not use photographs of the musician, did not sell music. There seemed to be no cause for confusion, except that both men shared the same name. Certainly, in my opinion, the musician didn't have a leg to stand on, and I hoped that the law saw it the same way. I was curious to see how the case came out. I decided to Google-search the final decision, but could not find it (though I found multiple references to the original case and a followup countersuit). Finally, it occurred to me just to visit the website and see whether it touted art or music. As of June 29, 2010, it still belongs to the painter, Keith Urban ~ not the musician. As a matter of fact, the lawsuit has probably brought the painter some success. The current site design is more professional and polished than the original site. It is obvious at first glance that the site belongs to an artist. It's not even necessary to read the text. The lack of any reference to a legal conclusion of this case makes me think that it might still be in arbitration. Or maybe no reporter ever dug deeper than the original AP release. Obviously, I hope that the website remains as it is: registered to the painter, Keith Urban of New Jersey. Keith Urban, the musician, simply lost out. I guess he should've claimed fame before 1999 (when the dot-com was registered). It all goes to show how important the choice of a domain name can be.

Bought and Paid For

2010-06-18T04:01:00.000-07:00

So, now I was the proud owner of a web site. Not a free website, this time, but one that was bought and paid for, with real money ~ not that Monopoly stuff. I think the true horror of what I'd done dawned on me as soon as the cash left my bank account. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say. I'd just forked over a week's pay, and for what? A blank, no-name website that I myself was going to have to build... brick by brick (or bracket by bracket, as the case may be). Talk about Frankenstein! Bugbones, indeed. I barely knew how to put two angle brackets together. And now I had a new dilemma... should I stick with my odd name? I loved my little Bugbones cartoon guy... but was he truly representative of me? Did I want him buzzing about my serious art? This was going to be my real site, my one true dot-com. I hadn't even bought my name yet, and here I had a web site, just wasting away. So much for fear of technology... my technological clock was ticking!

Choosing a Host: Let's Get Cheap

2009-07-10T09:05:00.000-07:00

I know why I avoided Network Solutions' hosting: the price. I have no idea why I chose to bypass OCS, my local ISP, and go after another host. Perhaps OCS wouldn't let me have my own domain on their free hosting plan. Perhaps they were already having business problems by then. OCS aside, I know exactly why I picked Icom. They were the cheapest package I found that published their ad in English. There may have been one cheaper, but it had the look of a man standing on a street corner in a trenchcoat. Wanna buy a watch? It's cheap. So... on February 19th, 2000, I signed up with Icom. It was to cost $49 for setup and $99 per year in hosting fees. Not long later, they sent me my temporary URL. I was now the proud owner of a site that said, "Under Construction." Now all I had to do was buy my domain name and point it. Icom sent me instructions on how to do this. These were something like stereo instructions (shades of Beetlejuice).

Network Solutions: The Dot-Com People

2009-04-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

In searching InterNIC, all roads led to Rome, or in this case, to Network Solutions. Network Solutions billed themselves as "the dot-com people." Apparently whatever InterNIC was, it was owned or controlled by Network Solutions, and any fee that I would have to pay must go into their coffers. If Network Solutions' hosting package was any indication of what InterNIC fees would be, I was in for an expensive ride. Their hosting package was about $300 a year, as I recall. Maybe more. And they didn't speak of web space in terms of megabytes or gigabytes, but of pages. For $300 you got a page. If you needed more pages, you bought more. A one-page site for 300 bucks. That's the way I read it. And here I was used to Angelfire, where you could have as many pages as you could build. I could tell by their terms that hosting was one thing and registration was another. I still don't know if my perception about Network Solutions' hosting package was wrong. Maybe by "page" they meant "site." Even so, their package was high.

Who is InterNIC?

2009-04-08T08:57:00.000-07:00

I had pretty well decided to have my dot-com, but now came the struggle to understand just what that entailed. There were several entities involved in domain purchase and maintenance, and the services each one offered weren't clear to me. One odd sticking point was "InterNIC fees." No matter who you chose as a registrar, and where you decided to park... no matter who hosted your page... YOU, the domain owner (said the fine print), were responsible for InterNIC fees. Who or what was InterNIC? And how much were these mysterious fees? No-one knew. I tore up the keyboard searching the 'Net for "InterNIC." The more I searched, the less I found ~ and the more confused I became. InterNIC fees began to loom as the strange, unknown quantity. Would these fees break me? Were we talking a dollar a year or fifty dollars a month? With Internet, it could be anything. There just wasn't any frame of reference. Common sense finally prevailed, and I decided that the "fee" was probably a nominal amount, like a tax.

The Year 2000 (Y2K)

2009-02-06T12:27:00.000-08:00

It was New Year's Eve of the year 2000 and we were all set to experience the greatest freakout of computer bugs in the history of glitches. It was the Milennium Bug. And it was said that the Internet wouldn't survive it. In fact, they said, even our clocks might not survive it. Our microwaves. Our cars. Anything that was guided by computer might come crashing to the ground, at dawn of the year 2000. They said this to a world who had maxed out their credit cards for every new electronic gadget that had come down the pike that decade. And now, they told us, it will all be a dud. And this, because of a lady who never foresaw the day we would need four digits to show the year. Maybe she did foresee it, but in 196?, it must have seemed eons away. And RAM was scarce. Techies and non-techies alike were running around like chickens with our heads cut off, squawking like Chicken Little: The sky is falling, the sky is falling. We won't survive the year 2000. My nieces were spending the night with us, and we were talking about the prospect of life without our newfound toy. (They jostled for elbow room at the computer. They didn't have one yet.) We played computer games and we watched the crowd in Times Square. We listened to predictions. I had my niece poised at the door, ready to run outside at my signal and blow the car horn. (That's what we do out in the boondocks.) Then the countdown started. Ack! At the stroke of midnight, the crowd went wild. I stood at the TV counting down for the ball to drop in Times Square. Outside, my niece did her duty and the horn was blaring. Far off, down in the pasture, fireworks boomed into the air. Our neighbors were celebrating, too.

On TV, all night, all they'd been speculating on was the stroke of midnight, and would every computer fail? After all my work, and on top of the news of the demise of my ArtForum, I was disgusted, as you might well imagine. But... I still had a sense of humor about it. At that moment, I conceived of a great practical joke that I would play on my nieces. No, I'm not the PJ I once was. I've mellowed ~ I have a reputation to maintain. Dignity. Integrity. But I still get a wild hare every now and then. I am a night owl, and the night was young. And I was giddy with champagne. I drank a whole cup. On TV, people were singing and dancing: 'It's the end of the world as we know it... and I feel fine! I feel fine!'

I felt fine! My computer was not smoking. But I was. I started hacking that keyboard. I was Stan with a plan. I was a Paintbrush whiz. I grabbed that Mouse and I painted that rectangle desktop green. Then I selected the color white, switched to text tool, and started typing gibberish. I chose Courier size 10 and I typed data. It didn't matter what data. I typed 000000s. I typed dates. I typed exes. I switched to Symbol and I typed Greek. I knew well what a trashed file looks like. I learned what a magnet does to a floppy disc back when floppies were 8 inches wide and, well ~ floppy. I covered that screen in Greek. In between the gibberish, I typed 2000, 1900, date does not compute. ERROR! ERROR! I typed all kinds of garbage. I switched to red, and changed the font size. I typed more garbage. Then I saved that file and made it into a Wallpaper. (Wallpaper was something I knew how to do. Early on, I'd had 6 months of a computer without Internet and with very little software loaded on it. I had time to learn how to do wallpaper.) Then I started on the folders.

By the year 2000, I had the knack of that drag-and-drop thing. I had Windows down pat. I created a single folder, and I named it dERRORf2000k. Then I dragged every folder on that desktop into that one folder. The one folder that couldn't be moved, I covered up. Shortcuts and Windows icons, I moved, covered with blank folders, or renamed to gibberish, having already learned that you can dump or rename shortcuts without affecting the file itself. I couldn't remove some of the Windows icons, but I could rename them. I renamed them gibberish. The one icon that wouldn't rename, I covered with the single folder I had created. That screen looked a mess! Those girls will freak when they see this screen, I thought. They will not know what to do. By then, I was dead tired, but happy, and I went to bed.

Come morning, I felt like dead meat. I am never much in the morning, and man, was I was sluggish that day! I was dying to see how the girls would react to to my little joke, but I didn't want to spill the beans, so I waited patiently. They never came up. I went downstairs and they were all involved in a movie. It was some long, drawn-out saga. It lasted for hours and hours. They never did come up. In the end, the joke was on me. My practical joke fell as flat as the Y2k Bug. I guess our great scare sounds pretty silly now. You just had to be there.

The Millenium Bug had scurried off to the cobwebs of tech history, and my site, Bugbones, was on the verge of a great new life. Said she.

Oh, the perils of Bugbones.

NOTE: This post was revised after I discovered I'd left out a segment. I've had to backtrack a little, in keeping with the timeline...
(Ref. chronology and y2k terms. I was there, but I just had to refresh my memory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Year_2000_problem&oldid=258180096)

FTP Configuration Headaches

2009-02-06T11:37:00.000-08:00

FTP. If I was going to have to start all over learning something, it might as well be some software of my own. I read everything I could find on FTP and thought I could learn it. So, I bought CuteFTP. I had no domain ~ but I had FTP.

Cute FTP was supposed to be easy. And it probably was, relatively speaking. I had no other FTP to compare it to, unless you count those on-line uploaders provided by Angelfire and Yahoo; but those didn't have to be configured. I shudder to recall the difficulty I had configuring Cute FTP. I don't think it was the fault of the software. Their help manual was thorough, but confusing to me. I had some fear of technology, and for good reason. I never really know what I'm doing when I try to configure things. Wizards ask questions, present choices. If I'd never seen the software, how did I know what to answer? If there is no wizard, it's even worse: a dozen drivers, icons, and executable files to unpack and distribute ~ very puzzling. Consequently, at the end of my struggle to configure any software, the machine usually works worse than when I started ~ or doesn't work at all. Asking around doesn't help. When I was configuring CuteFTP, no-one I knew had ever heard of FTP. I muddled my way through, read the manual a dozen times, and went through a blue-jillion trial-and-error steps. Something didn't click. I don't know what was more confusing, the tilde in the username, my host's directory structure, the proper placement of slashes for directories, or the meticulous instructions on filling in IP numbers. Usually in these battles, if my struggle doesn't lead to complete destruction of my PC, it leads to new knowledge, if not expertise. In the FTP battle, I studied other sites' URLs, looked at their slashes and tildes, dug through my ISP's original installation instructions, and read up on IP numbers. I puzzled through manuals, tried what I thought they said, and failed time and time again. Then, with some sudden revelation, the path was clear and I was "in." The old epic writings speak of wailing, moaning, and the gnashing of teeth. I can tell you I did plenty of it. So much trauma! And yet ten years later, I had practically forgotten ever hosting Bugbones at OCS Online and couldn't remember why I'd bought CuteFTP. My file dates and page links show that by February of 2000 ~ maybe even before ~ I had Bugbones the second up and running on OCS. All of this, I did with the idea of getting my own domain.

Topic: The Annals of Southern Muse.
Timeline: Purchased CuteFTP on May 21, 1999

Domains, Registrars, and Hosts

2009-02-05T17:40:00.000-08:00

I had spent several months reading up on domains and how to get them. I was confused by the various entities involved in getting a domain. I only had a vague comprehension of the differences between a domain, a registrar, a host, and a server. It mattered, because each separate entity had its own set of fees ~ and how much might those be? Each process also brought its own new set of technical difficulties. I discovered that a domain name was one thing ~ you could "park" it free (whatever that meant). Page hosting was another thing entirely, and no matter how much I read, it seemed that I couldn't get around having to pay a monthly fee for it. Free advice was everywhere to be found, and some of the tutorials stated that your local ISP might give you a free page. I checked into it. Sure enough, OCS, my local Internet Service Provider, did offer a free personal web page. Since I was already paying them for Internet service and the page was "free," I thought that hosting might be included in the monthly fee I was already paying. If so, I would only have to buy a domain name. OCS didn't have FTP, but buying FTP software would still be cheaper than a monthly hosting fee.

At this point, I wasn't even sure that OCS would let me hang a domain name on the free page they gave me. Angelfire advertised that you could turn your free page into a domain at any time ~ for a fee. But what was I buying? The terms were confusing. I knew I'd be paying for space that I now got for free. Oh, Angelfire promised I'd get lots of other cool things that I didn't know I needed ~ wouldn't know what to do with when I got them. But the Angelfire web-shell upgrade had left me in a bind. I could barely log in, much less navigate the new directory. Did I want to pay them for that? I now knew that Angelfire wasn't the only host in town. Cheap hosting was everywhere, for as little as five dollars a month. Nearly all hosts required a one-time set-up fee, ranging from fifteen to seventy dollars. I could manage a one-time flat fee. Registering a domain name would cost about ten dollars. Once you had a domain name, you had to "park" it apparently. I wasn't sure what "parking" entailed. Was it free parking, or would I have to put a quarter in the meter ever few hours? (I thought I knew the answer to that!) What was the difference between registering and parking anyhow?

Transition: Bugbones to Southern Muse.

Reconstructing the Timeline

2009-02-03T11:42:00.000-08:00

I can place the dates of some of these events with pretty good accuracy, with the help of Wikipedia, old e-mails, and the invoice paper trail. MiningCo came into being about 1996. My old PC was built by OCS (a local hack) in 1997, but I got it secondhand a few years later. Late in 1998, I'd discovered Yahoo Mail and Angelfire. Sometime that same year came the Art Forum on MiningCo. Perhaps it was already there, but I found it in '98. My short-lived Bugbones Buzz forum on InsideTheWeb.com was in place by January 1999, if not before. Sometime between that little forum and May of 1999, I had scraped up enough to hook up Internet. I was an old hand at email by now, but using the email wizard to configure a local ISP provider's info through Outlook Express was another story. What headaches! (The Perils of Dial-Up Modems and Lost Drivers on Second-Hand Computers will be saved for another post.) Also around May of 1999, MiningCo disappeared and About.com came on the scene.
On May 21, 1999, I bought CuteFTP. I didn't have a domain. When I came across that old receipt, I was puzzled as to why I bought an FTP program before I bought a domain, but it came back to me...

Kudos to Philip!

2009-01-29T12:49:00.000-08:00

So... kudos to Philip the Guide. We all said it at the time, but I don't know if we were heard. Our praises and gratitude back then could be taken as posturing. We were losing the forum. Everybody got sentimental ~ even gushy. Praise was bandied around right and left to one and all. Philip was praised, but I don't know if he really 'heard' it. It's depressing to be dumped, but to be dumped when the forum was hot on the griddle... Philip was a good guide! I've seen forums come and go. I even tried my own hand at building a forum (it died on the vine). Forums are hard to keep going. It takes a good host (Delphi was great). It needs backing (About.com was paying their guides). But it really helps to have a good guide. Philip was the man who made the Art Forum what it was. He posted regularly and kept the threads going. If a discussion was going strong, he let it have its head and run its course. If things started lagging, he started a new topic. Yet when I look back, he kept his remarks brief. Just enough to stimulate the conversation, really. He did all this in addition to maintaining The Artist's Exchange's huge directory and writing tons of articles. Kudos to Philip and the old Artist's Exchange Art Forum. On this day, I want to set it in stone.

Topics: Philip the Guide, The Artist's Exchange Art Forum, About.com

Philip DeLoach: Picture This

2009-01-29T12:40:00.000-08:00

A bit of information gleaned from Philip's website shows that he was a content provider for the Artists' Exchange at About.com for six years. The Artist's Exchange website was included in an article entitled "29 Must-See Web Sites for Artists" in the October 2000 issue of The Artist's Magazine. That year, the Art Forum was going strong. That was just before the dot-com bubble hit the fan. About.com's bubble didn't burst completely, but it became mighty thin. Our beloved Art Forum was in the part that evaporated altogether. I've barely touched on forum, and the demise of it really belongs in a later post. But while I'm thinking back on it, and before I get started on another topic, I wanted to give due thanks and praise.

Reference: Philip DeLoach.
Website: Picture This
URI: http://pdeloach.tripod.com/index.html

Topics: Miningco. Philip the Guide. Art Forum.

An Aside to the Guide

2009-01-29T12:23:00.000-08:00

I was amazed that the guide of the art forum was a southerner, one who had lived in the North Georgia mountains at one time, and had Alabama ties, as well. It isn't important to know a guide's biography, but meeting a friendly face with a familiar story in a sea of tech-talk added a whole new dimension to Internet technology for me. It made the world smaller. So occasionally I e-mailed Philip or sent him an update, and he would do the same. He was perhaps my first on-line human/cyber contact, outside of friends and family. At one time or another, over a several-year period, I corresponded with him and others did too. This was not a case of our taking his forum 'guidance' so personally that we thought we should direct correspondence to him instead of posting on the Forum. It was more in the nature of an 'aside' to the guide. Sometimes a subject might go off topic, so we went outside forum to keep from boring the rest of the crowd. Southern stories, for instance, didn't really belong on Art Forum, but it would be silly to go search out a new forum just to elaborate on a thread or reminisce over old times.

But what started this friendly chit-chatty kind of off-topic conversation was when, early on, I'd made the off-hand remark to Philip, 'Hey, weren't you the same guide who ran an old art forum on MiningCo? I was that person PauperWitch who used to post. We e-mailed once.'

And Philip said (my paraphrase), 'Oh, yeah. I remember. I like your new nickname better.' Because by then I had settled on what would become my true web presence, humble and obscure though that presence may be. I was, by then, Southern Muse.

Topics: Philip the Guide, southern, MiningCo, North Georgia mountains, Annals of Southern Muse.

Philip the Guide: Zizzer Buttons.

2009-01-29T12:12:00.000-08:00

So now I knew Philip the Guide was southern. But a couple of other posts made me realize just how much we had in common. One day, for instance, he mentioned zizzer buttons in a post. I quickly tossed him a 'Zizzer buttons? How-on-earth-did-you...? Because I knew of zizzer buttons. Comparing notes, we decided that this must be an Alabama thing. Silly coincidences like that. (I now have a tidbit about zizzer buttons on Southern Muse Journal blog). Another coincidental crossing of our paths was when he told OsoTBear (one of the regulars and a really talented, successful sculptor) about the Weinman Mineral Museum.* "Philip!" I replied. "As I live and breathe! I was at the Weinman Mineral Museum just last week! How did you know about the museum?" Once again, a coincidence. Philip was an old Georgia boy. I knew he had painted a mural of The General, so this shouldn't have come as a surprise. But The General is well known, while the Weinman Mineral Museum is a little off the beaten path. So that was unexpected. My own visit to it was still fresh in my mind.

*The Weinman Mineral Museum closed for renovation and expansion in about 2006 and has recently reopened as the Tellus Northwest Georgia Science Museum. The URI is http://www.tellusmuseum.org/
It's bigger than the old Weinman Mineral Museum. The Weinman Museum had some wonderful specimens, mostly natural geological minerals and gemstones from North Georgia and around the world. They also have some nice artifacts and exhibits such as carved urns and other pieces.

Old/transitional URI, still extant as of January 2009: http://www.weinmanmuseum.org/

Topics: Philip the Guide, Art Forum.

Philip the Guide: Mountain Man.

2009-01-29T12:08:00.000-08:00

Philip had been hanging around the Art Forum as a guide for several years. I'd learned that he was an artist and a southerner. An offhand post here or there would result in another coincidental crossing of our paths. I began to realize that Philip was not just from the South ~ he was truly Southern. That carries a lot of baggage. Philip wasn't city southern, he was hill-country Southern. There's a persistent theme of legend, myth, familial tradition and poverty that runs deep in the blood of those who come from the mountains. "You can take the man out of the mountain, but you can't take the mountain out of the man." Stray remarks or a certain turn of words gave him away. I tend to lapse into southernisms in my own remarks. A few of the others on Art Forum did, too, and Philip responded in similar fashion. Internet technicians don't take to dialect too well ~ they always scold against its use. Technically speaking But it's all part of a long tradition, and is a casual, fun, friendly kind of banter. It comes as natural to some of us as talking, and is a representation of actual conversation. In fact, dialect has a life of its own, and these slight variations in usage can make all the difference in the world in the connotation of our spoken words. To stifle the use of it is to censor words and ideas, but there are some who would do it. The South is pretty well homogenized now, and ours is the last generation that links to the land. Our parents' generation is the last of those who tilled it. Philip and I both recognized that. So in Philip the Guide, I'd met a friend and a kindred spirit. Not to mention he was a poet!

Topics: Philip the Guide, The Artist's Exchange Art Forum, Southern.

Philip the Guide: a Southerner!

2009-01-29T11:08:00.000-08:00

As I said, the pure genius of About's "guide" program was that no-one felt as if they were interacting with customer support. It was more as if you'd happened to sit next to a nice fellow at the corner pub, and struck up an interesting conversation while you finished your beer; or maybe you'd bumped into somebody at the bus stop, and a boring, 30-minute wait turned into an easygoing, casual conversation that made the time go faster. Philip the Guide provided a light and informal exchange that added the needed touch of humor, philosophy, wisdom, and continuity to the discussions. Sure, the conversation might go off topic, or the threads might start to lag, or the occasional troll would pop in and do his dirty work. That's when the guide would step in and perk things up or smooth things over. Our guide had just the right mix of humor and homespun philosophy... a philosophy, in fact, that turned out to be southern.

About.com, Art Forum, Philip the Guide.

Southern Tech?

2009-01-29T03:20:00.000-08:00

An offhand post here or there would result in another bit of information about the Internet and how it works. For instance, one time Philip mentioned that he had painted a mural of The General in Kennesaw, Georgia. I had visited that museum and seen the mural. This made me curious ~ he'd been hanging around the Art Forum for several years by then, and I just thought he was one of those techie guys. I thought he and a bunch of guys had started MiningCo dot-com, and that they all were sitting together in a brick-and-mortar building in California, hacking away like Bill Gates or something. And he explained that such was not the case, he was just a paid guide, a plain old joe and an artist, not a dot-com owner or anything. It was just a new bit of information for me to digest, about how Internet and file-sharing work, and how a dot-com owned by a corporation in New York City has a guide who lives in Smalltown, USA. And not a real tech guy. In fact, another artist. Kind of like me. It's not as if the concept of remote work was new to me. For several years now, my job had been as a local interviewer (North Georgia) for a corporation that was located in Maryland. But finding a "local" (sort of) guide on the Art Forum was just another funny coincidence. It was another bit of data to add to my growing understanding of what the Internet is. What it might become.

New Forum, Old Faces

2009-01-29T03:16:00.000-08:00

I was a little puzzled about the new forum with the old faces. One of the old faces was Philip ~ the same Philip who had sent me off on my early quest for scanned images of my art. The first time we crossed paths in a discussion, I asked him about the resemblance of the two forums, and he told me about MiningCo's new name, About.com. Like MiningCo, About.com had "guides," and Philip was the guide of the art forum. Most customer support on the Web is a frustrating, robotic interchange of impersonal forms. About.com guides were different. Part of their task was to keep the threads of discussion open, while keeping the forum running smoothly. In other words, they were "customer support," without seeming to be support. When you think about it, it was pure genius, and MiningCo ~ now doing business as About.com ~ had been the first to think of it. Guides put a human face on the cold, impersonal technology of the Internet. Later I would run across articles on About's "guide" program, and found that it was considered an edgy and creative concept among tech gurus; or at least, it was About.com's claim to fame where brand marketing was concerned.

MiningCo, About.com, Philip, and The Artist's Exchange Art Forum.

The Artist's Exchange on About.com

2009-01-24T21:05:00.000-08:00

When my old link to The Artist's Exchange didn't work, I began to search for other art forums. The art sites I found, once again, were pretty dismal. But I finally came across "The Artist Exchange" again. At first, I was confused. This new Artist's Exchange was on About.com, not MiningCo. It seemed to be an endless maze of links that led to brief, shallow articles. At first I was puzzled and not too impressed. I was about to give About.com a quick pass. Searches for art kept bringing it up, though, and eventually I discovered a link to a forum on there. It had the same name as the other forum and was similar in a lot of ways. This forum, it turned out, was even better than the old one. I found the same same excellent, in-depth discussions; there were just more of them. This new forum enjoyed steady "traffic," a thing I could fully appreciate, having already surfed around in several interesting but rather "slow" forums. And I had tried my hand at starting the little Bugbones Buzz forum at Inside the Web. The new Art Forum had many layers of art resources, discussions and links. Artists were posting on it regularly, on a varied array of art-related topics. This was what I'd been hunting for so long.

MiningCo, The Artist's Exchange, and About.com.

Few and Far Between...

2009-01-23T20:37:00.000-08:00

I guess I know how I came to lose the art forum. I was alternating between playing with my Bugbones web page, e-mailing and net-surfing. Somewhere along the line I had caved in and gotten Internet at home. Maybe it was that tiresome 20-mile drive... or maybe it was the foot-tapping of waiting while other people used that one-hour timeshare on the library computer; because by now, I wasn't the only one in our burg who knew about Internet. I'd tried the local community college and found the waiting time much less (they had a whole row of computers, sitting idle outside of peak hours). But parking at the college was a whole new ballgame. Sometimes you could barely navigate between the double-parkers. Some days I just gave it up and went home. At some point I slapped down my money, hooked up my modem, and started surfing in the luxury of my own home. One line, no waiting. All mine. Internet in living color to view as I liked on my 8-inch green screen. But sometimes, as Spock said, "having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting."* Now I could check my favorite forums daily and surf to my heart's content. But having my own Internet hook-up brought whole new problems. Not only was there familial conflict (I'll get to that); but popping into forums, eagerly awaiting the next bit of wisdom wasn't what it was cracked up to be. Posts were few and far between. And as crazy as it seems, I had, by now, even started my own little forum: the short-lived Bugbones Buzz. What with all this going on, and with having to restrict my 'Net-surfing time, I must have quit checking art forum daily. And right about then, it just disappeared. Along with MiningCo.

MiningCo, The Artist's Exchange Art Forum, and Bugbones.

*Thanks to mac.com for the Spock quote I was looking for:
http://homepage.mac.com/m5comp/trekbits/trekpics/amok/index.html

Bugbones, PauperWitch, and Art Forum

2009-01-23T20:04:00.000-08:00

I think I began by posting on the art forum as Bugbones, the same nickname that I had used for e-mail. I don't know if it was the 'uggy' sound of the bug name, or the paranoia of keeping my e-mail private, that made me change the nickname. Maybe it was just because it was tempting to have multiple identities. The Internet let you do that, and who hasn't wanted to be somebody else for a change? It was fun. So I chose 'PauperWitch.' PauperWitch was a throwback to my love of literature. She was a character from a Robert Frost poem that I liked and it sounded really edgy; especially compared to JoeBlow24203, the typical Delphi suggestion. There were no 'wiccan' overtones to my choice and I wasn't dirt poor ~ just felt that way sometimes. So now I was regularly perusing art forum, and posting as PauperWitch, and Philip asked to see photos, and I sent them via HotMail. Not without trouble. Right away I began to learn about file size. I had carefully composed my nice e-mail and began to attach the photos that had been so hard to scan. Hotmail timed out. I didn't know it was a time out. I just knew I would hit send, everything would go blank, and my letter would be gone. Into the Twilight Zone, not into the outbox. Hotmail apologized and maybe they blamed Netscape Navigator... I don't know. I managed to get the photos to Philip and we discussed art back and forth for awhile. Then, since it seemed I could be away from forum for days or weeks and not miss much, I went back to working on my page. One day I went back to forum and found that it, like my e-mail, was now residing in... the Twilight Zone!

MiningCo and the Artist's Exchange Art Forum

One-Sided Conversation

2009-01-23T19:38:00.000-08:00

I first mentioned MiningCo when I blogged on Christmas Eve 2008, back when I was discussing scanners, when I mentioned the 'quest,' when Philip asked for photos of my art. Philip was the art forum guide, and I had discovered the art forum through MiningCo...so I know that my discovery of MiningCo was early on in my Internet adventures. It was before my Hotmail account and before I borrowed the use of Terri's scanner for a day. In fact, MiningCo was what led me to seek a scanner. I can't say I had foreseen all this, but I can say that the day that ad flickered past and disappeared, I knew I'd lost something important. So I was glad to find them again. And I wasn't disappointed. MiningCo's directory started with 'A,' and 'Art' was included ~ something Yahoo couldn't boast, and still can't to this day. (Why should they. They have 'B,' which apparently stands for Brittney Spears, and does the world have to look further for true enlightenment?) The 'A' in Art led to 'The Artist's Exchange,' a directory of art resources. That, in turn, led to the Art Forum. I posted on Art Forum a time or two as 'Bugbones.' I was intriqued at the thought of discussing art with anyone, anywhere in the world. There were some nice thoughts posted on there, so I jumped right in. Art Forum was nice, it was interesting... it just wasn't hopping. Like many of those early forums, it was in the doldrums. The conversation was kind of one-sided. Someone would post an interesting thought, and I would find it a week or two down the road and reply. But they were by then long gone and might not be back for a week or a month, if at all. The posts were few and far between, but they showed promise. Philip was the guide, and he was pretty good to keep the threads going even then.

MiningCo and The Art Forum (The Artist's Exchange).

Finding MiningCo

2009-01-23T19:05:00.000-08:00

MiningCo... I think the way I finally found them was through TV. Theirs was one of the first TV ads I saw for a dot-com ~ and that was after I had 'lost' them by failing to click on their banner ad in time. It's funny that I found them when I did. I had by then become dissatisfied with what I was finding on the Internet. I expected the world's largest library, but the Internet seemed to be one big smiley ~ with chat. (Later I was told that the 'Net itself wasn't at fault, that my gripe was probably with the search engines of the day.) Probably, this is true, and MiningCo was 1999's answer to that. They promised to mine relevant data as one would mine precious ore. MiningCo. A dot-com that would dig through the sludge and find the gems for you! The whole thing was a coincidence. Seeing their eye-catching banner whiz past, losing them, finding them again through TV. Just a funny name, but the tagline seemed promising of great things. MiningCo turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. For, with MiningCo came The Artist's Exchange and Art Forum.

MiningCo and Art Forum.

Searching for MiningCo

2009-01-21T08:15:00.000-08:00

I had added the requisite smiley-face sites to Bugbones, but I wanted more. I wanted art sites, good-quality humor sites, education... Yahoo Search just wasn't delivering. Right about then, by an odd coincidence, I stumbled upon Miningco. Miningco was my first real evidence that the Internet might contain access to the great art, intelligent conversation, and educational material that I suspected was out there. (I mean, it was the Information Superhighway, right? not limited to smiley faces.) MiningCo had been around since 1996, but it was about '98 or '99 when I discovered it. At first, I just got a brief glimpse of the name by accident. An ad went whizzing by when I clicked an e-mail in Yahoo. The name intriqued me... whatever it was. Mining Info, Mining Dot-Com, MineCompf? And the banner was not cyan or magenta. Certainly that looked original and promising. I had spied the ad mid-click, but it vanished before I could get a good look. I tried backing up, tried clicking through ad after ad. It was gone. Try as I might, I couldn't recall that odd dot-com name. I searched mine, mining, mining info... (Wanna buy a carbide lamp? I know where you can get one.) I liked-to-never found MiningCo in search. I really had to dig for it. Come to think of it, it is ironic that I was trying to find a search engine through search.

The Perils of Bugbones.
MiningCo and the Art Forum.

Accessories... Gimme, gimme, gimme!

2009-01-17T16:33:00.000-08:00

It was kind of hard to add content to an art site without a scanner. I still didn't have one ~ didn't think I could afford one. It's hard to justify every fancy electronic gadget that comes out on the market. Through that "free" dinosaur of mine, I learned the real snare of computer ownership. Accessories. Computers and accessories are like bread and butter, Satan and sinners, women and new shoes. The computer gobbled my spare change like a duck gobbles a june bug. I didn't have a computer, I had my own Little Shop of Horrors. A mechanized monster, with an incessant appetite for RAMs and chips. Growling, "Feed me!" And my wallet was straight out of a comic strip... open it up, and out floats a decrepit moth. Talk about Bugbones. I was broke. So in the absense of scanners and fancy photo-editing programs, I did what every low-rent webmaster was doing in 1999. I turned to search engines. I was gonna find me some links.

The perils of Bugbones.

I, Frankenstein...

2009-01-16T14:19:00.001-08:00

He lives! He lives! Bugbones lives! I, Frankenstein, have created this thing. I had conquered the Yahoo sign-up, the Angelfire sign-up, the Hotmail sign-up, the log-in fury. No longer the newbie! begging the definition of "cookie"... struggling with the concept of "upload." I was an old hand. I could use Web Shell. I could use an on-line FTP. No clip-art from a gallery for me! I uploaded my own GIFs. I had gritted my teeth, tackled HTML, and come out of it alive (though somewhat the worse for wear). By Web Monkey's advice, I had simplified my logo design... mastered Paintbrush, drew my bug, tweaked him with freeware, smoothed him with the elegant money-bought LViewPro... This I did amid crashes that threatened the extinction of stone-age dinosaurs (myself and my ancient PC). I had pored over Webmonkey tutorials, scanned my Dummy book, deciphered the Rosetta stone, cracked the code. And by God, I had my webpage, topped with my fine Bugbones GIF, of the coveted transparent background, not to be achieved with mere Paint. Survived the Webshell Upgrade, adopted the WYSIWYG editor, created my Sizzzlinks page of the weird fonts. Wow! What a journey. Now it was time to add content. I didn't think of it in those terms. In 1999 the eternal "Content" wasn't yet the god of the Internet. I wasn't thinking "Content." I just wanted stuff on my page.

The perils of Bugbones.

Algebra and Pizza

2009-01-12T12:57:00.000-08:00

It's a sad thing to be geekless in a geek-driven world. I had so many questions. Technical forums were above my head. I learned not to post as a newbie (no need to be the butt of jokes). Sitting back and quietly waiting for the right answer to come up wasn't much help, either. Tech discussions, to me, always looked like those algebra problems Mr. Leonard used to put on the board. "If Train A is going X miles per hour on a zigzag railroad track and Train B is going Y miles per hour in the opposite direction, and the bridge is out at Point C... then who gets to order pizza?" (Mr. Leonard was a schizophrenic. I'm sure of it.) My brother wasn't much help. He thought I knew more about computers than he did. My niece, who seemed to be a whiz on computers, had a slight attention-deficit problem. She could hack away at the keyboard all right, but she rarely slowed down enough to find out what I actually wanted her to do. I wanted doublespacing in my text documents. "Here, look at all these cool fonts I downloaded for you," she would say.

"Uh, thanks," I'd say, "but I really liked Times New Roman better without those little cactus spines." There was another side effect to that particular brand of tech help. At the end, my machine would quite likely be reduced to a pile of rubble. Her professional philosophy pretty much fit in with all those Terms of Use documents you sign daily. "When it breaks, you're up the creek without a paddle and we're not liable. Oh yeah... and your machine will be reduced to a pile of rubble..."

Fat Shirley's Tech-Support Hotline... ?

2009-01-10T03:22:00.000-08:00

Yes, humor had definite possibilities for a website. And I was already in humor mode. I was still an e-mail newbie. I was in joke-hog heaven! My mind was racing ahead to all the funny things I could write for Bugbones. And I could enlist my brother's help. He was in a funny band. They did skits, they had gigs. (It's what led to him being a woman in Fat Shirley's: A Trailer-Park Opera. That came later.) In fact he was also itching to do a site. He'd already started a small one. I helped. I helped him with opening an e-mail account and logging in and setting up a site. He helped me with which plug went in which socket, what the heck was a USB port, and did I have one? (I didn't) We were the amateur tech-support in our neck of the woods by now. All of our friends came to us. Professional tech support was available, but expensive. They had two answers to every question we asked: (a) we can plug in this disk and reinstall Windows; and (b) we can sell you this new PC ~ it has more megahertz. We did attempt to branch out and network among friends. To each of our questions, they had this response: 'I don't know nothing. All I know is WordPerfect.'

The Perils of Bugbones...

Technology was Devouring My Life

2009-01-08T10:15:00.000-08:00

So now Bugbones was officially a cartoon site, a fun site. That might do do for graphic art, fun and frivolous illustrations, and humor. Bugbones, as barren as it was, had been a lot of work. I could still imagine great things for it. In fact, the doing of a site was now a goal in itself. Maybe it was even an obsession. This World-Wide-Web thing was aptly named. It was a giant web and I was caught up in it. I was a hapless fly. Technology was devouring my life. Here I am, ten years later, still struggling to keep up with technology. But I am not alone. I am one fly of over 108 million.* So, in 1999, with Bugbones barely off of the drawing board, I began to conceive of my "real" site. An art site. Not fun art. My art. But could a tired, frustrated non-techie aspire to having two sites? She thought she could. Barely a glimmer of an idea, this second site. A glimmer of light. And I was a moth to it...

The Perils of Bugbones.
Annals of Southern Muse begin.

*As of 2007, according to Boutell.com, there were over 108 million websites, sporting more than 19.2 billion pages, on the World Wide Web. And growing. No, I am not alone. Reference: "WWW FAQs: How many websites are there?" URI <http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/misc/sizeofweb.html>. Boutell.com. Accessed 30 December 2008.

Easter Bunny Ears on John Wesley

2009-01-07T16:12:00.000-08:00

By now my brain had switched gears and I was ready to do a humor site. Humor wasn't new to me. I had done my own cartoon strip for my high school paper. In college, I had had a high old time with humorous graphics and illustration, along with my true love, fine art. Not to mention, I'd done my fair share of gluing shoes to the floor, smearing Vaseline on doorknobs, hoisting underwear up the flagpole, and carrying of the roommate's bed out to put on top of the breezeway. Of painting the breaker-box covers with naughty little cartoons in the middle of the night. (It was artfully done.) Of putting Easter-bunny ears and a basket of eggs on the statue of John Wesley. (The dean of students just smiled ~ he was an old friend by then). It hit the morning papers. We had no idea someone had called them. The reporter was highly amused. The college president, much less so. I don't think he ever did get over it. Later he crankily accused us, the art students, of stealing a statue of a little boy with a thorn in his foot. We didn't. Or at least I didn't. That's real vandalism and theft. I don't go in for that. You know, that college president and our dean of students retired the year I graduated. I don't know why.

Bugbones, a fun site. Our new theme.

Oh, the perils of bugbones.

Screechy Modems and 8-inch Screens

2009-01-07T16:01:00.000-08:00

I wanted elegantly themed pages of subtle colors and artistic backgrounds and loads of images. But I accepted Webmonkey's advice and designed my Bugbones page to conform to something less than state-of-the-art technology. Users were running obsolete dinosaurs, said Webmonkey. That meant Windows95 and 8-inch monitors and 19kb dial-up modems. If broadband was around, nobody I knew had it. In fact, it was all I could do to understand the definitions of these terms when I ran into them. What's DSL? What's broadband? I tore up my keyboard up trying to get an answer to these questions. I knew what a modem was: the thing inside my PC that made a horrid screechy sound when I clicked the Internet icon. A modem sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard, and if I was lucky, I got a growl and hiss that told me the hookup was complete. It's not a friendly sounding thing. Perhaps we should have taken that growl as an omen that the Internet did not want us. But we ignored the screech and growl and waited the slow, slow wait for our browsers to load. As for my page design... I had no trouble, beyond mere thoughts of rebellion, to restricting my layout to stay within the limitations of dial-up modems and 8-inch screens. That's what I was running. It was all I knew.

The perils of Bugbones.

Changing Page Themes

2009-01-06T10:46:00.000-08:00

Before long, I would be plagued with upgraded web shells, bloated templates, faltering dot coms, and vanishing hosts. But enough of that for the moment. Right now, I had my logo and I had a web page to fill. I had taken Webmonkey's advice: Keep it simple. Keep it cartoony. I felt sure that that little monkey knew more than I did. I was hip to it! I was well-read and in-the-know. Not for me, the newbie webmaster's mistake, of fancy, airbrushed graphics. Primary colors, bold outlines! That was the key. But a cartoony logo meant a cartoony site. Somehow, the idea of it didn't fit in with my paintings. I was torn between what I read and what I actually wanted to do. I had to admit, I didn't have the tools to or knowledge to do a fancy art site. So, here I was, rethinking Bugbones. My site would have to have jokes and chatty newsletters. Why not? Everyone else on the Web had them! My limitations as a non-techie were already changing the theme and future content of my website.

Oh, the perils of Bugbones!

Dump the Images, They Say...

2009-01-05T08:16:00.000-08:00

Judging by what I saw of on-line content, smileys were what people wanted. Charlene wasn't the only one who resented this. Over the years, I found that Web technicians deeply resented the demands of page designers. The Web (they said) is for the presentation of information, of words, of ideas. Not for pictures of your family pet or your Aunt Sally. But, as an artist, I have to say that images are ideas! Images are content! I was trying so hard to conform to what technicians wanted. "Dump the images," they insisted. "Get rid of flashy gimmicks and scrolling marquees! Don't load your page with pictures. Users hate fancy airbrushed backgrounds that are slow to load." Excuse me! My eventual goal was to get my paintings on line. This is not the family pet. My art is not a little white rat! But if it were, who are these scientists to tell me not to love it? Not to express my creativity? I grew angry at technicians who demanded control over my content. Before long I got a frightful lesson in how the arbitrary decisions of nameless, faceless technicians and corporations play a vital role in how you, the user, will interact with the world; how, and whether, your content will be presented.

Confessions of a non-techie.

I Drew Smileys Because I Could.

2009-01-04T09:08:00.000-08:00

Here was left brain meeting right brain. And they clashed. It's not exactly true that Charlene hated color. She appreciated art and had a better understanding of it than some of my fellow artists. What she resented was the intrusion of pop-culture into a medium that had heretofore been reserved for scholars, librarians, and scientists. Important exchanges of information were being overrun with games, idle chitchat, and SPAM. I can empathize with that. Smileys do abound ~ as do ads for Viagra, ad nauseum. Bugbones "fun stuff" wasn't a world-class contribution to the body of human knowledge. It could only be called cheerful pollution. I was a child to the world of computers. The Internet was a new toy for me. I drew smileys because they were all I could manage at the time. It bespeaks the level of my technical expertise. Windows Paint was all I had. And building a page was my way of tackling the Internet. I did it because... it was there. Why do people climb Mount Everest?

Information? Or Pinball?

2009-01-04T00:04:00.000-08:00

Early on in my web-page-editing days, I complained to my friend Charlene about how disappointed I was in the Information Superhighway: how hard it was to create a page, what a difficult time I was having with the art tools. She said to me, glumly, "I don't like this new icon-based Internet." I didn't quite know what she meant. I knew what icons were: small symbols, like red-ball Gifs and little blue mailboxes. You clicked on them and they brought you stuff. True, the Web was overrun with smiley faces... Was this her gripe? a grudge against frivolity? I could empathize with that. The 'Net was supposed to be every scholar's dream, and here it was turning into one big pinball machine. I couldn't get Charlene to commisserate with me over how hard it was to layout a page of my own design and theme, and upload my art. I came to realize that her complaint went deeper than than just a dislike of smileys. It was images she despised! Charlene was used to a text-based Internet. She'd had a taste of early DOS. A black screen. Simple lines of plain text in the old Courier font. Catalog cards all numbered and indexed. She resented the intrusion of color!

Confessions of a non-techie.

Bugbones, Computer Envy, and Columbo.

2009-01-03T23:55:00.000-08:00

What a chore the Bugbones logo was to create! A task that would have been a breeze using colored ink and brush was torture using that MOUSE. My hand nearly froze into a permanent claw. In fact, I made the rare (for me) accessory purchase afterwards, my first in a succession of attempts to find the perfect MOUSE. Where was the intuitive pencil-MOUSE? Where was the Star Trek inspired, user-friendly wizard of a machine that would suck in my drawing, let me punch in a couple of plain-talk commands, find the contours, smooth them, and auto-morph those crude Paintbrushy pixels into the cute little Bugbones that I could see on my paper and envision on my 8-inch screen? Would this ever, ever be the future of technology? For all I knew, it was the current state of technology. Just not here in the big woods. Meanwhile, I'm punching a keyboard that looks like something off of an old Columbo show.

"What is this machine?"

"That's a computer, lieutenant."

"Where do you put the ribbon?"

The perils of Bugbones: Confessions of a non-techie.

Voila! Bugbones...

2009-01-02T12:36:00.000-08:00

So after all that work, was my final Bugbones worth it? The homely creature that metamorphosed from bug-gnawed skeleton, to desert-dried fossil, to goofy little cartoon guy? Well, I have to say, "yes!" Bugbones is me! He's simple, really. Take a bug. Give him startled yellow pop-eyes and crumpled antennas. Toss in some silly little dog-biscuit bones and a plump, round belly. Voila! There you have him. A little sick, maybe, but highly representative of the artist's devilish mind. Through blood, sweat and tears, I drew him ~ my computer-generated masterpiece ~ using a MOUSE and Windows Paintbrush. With LView Pro I tweaked him: softer tones, hints of airbrushing, smoothed edges, and (important to me) a transparent background, achievable only through those deluxe art-editing programs. My original cheesy, jagged, flat little lime-green bug was now a softly curved, pleasantly colored, fairly elegant little guy. Bugbones had style, he had personality. He had guts. And they were splattered all over the windshield. By now, I knew how that bug felt.

Oh, the perils of Bugbones.

Fractals, Straight Lines, and Curves

2009-01-02T12:11:00.000-08:00

Yes, something clicked. It's funny how that happens. I had recently discovered an on-line game that drew fractals. I had never heard of fractals, but the site had an explanation of the phenomenon of structured growth patterns in nature, and a fun little program that let you play with fractals. Now, just after I'd seen fractals in action, here was a guy saying he used the straight-line tool to draw curves. My brainwaves did an electrical arc. It was a quantum leap for me. I suddenly envisioned how I could use a straight line to draw curves, like the sculptor who takes a block of marble and chips away everything that doesn't look like a horse. I would use the straight line to cut away the part of the curve that isn't needed. I would pull each line out at a tangent from the curve, as the line of a fractal coming out from a central point. I now saw that I could use LView Pro to create the highlights and shadows that I needed on Bugbones, then use Windows Paintbrush to trim and smooth the contours of the main shapes. It was a strange workaround, no doubt, but one that I still use today.

The perils of Bugbones.

"I'm gonna make some art."

2009-01-02T12:10:00.000-08:00

...so she said. LView Pro was a challenge. Their icons were good, especially compared to the generic interface of the standard Windows programs I was used to. You didn't have to sort through dozens of generic labels like "File" and "View." If you wanted a paintbrush, there was a nice icon of a paintbrush. Simple. LView Pro had an excellent tutorial, and most of the tools were self-explanatory. But good art editing software is necessarily complex, and some things just can't be explained in words. A video would have been nice. Masks were impossible for me. Curves, too. (My Bugbones sketch was full of curves.) I had the devil of a time getting my MOUSE to behave. I would start drawing a curve, but couldn't figure out the right succession of clicks to pin the darn thing into place. One wrong click and my excellent curve would simply disappear. When I complained of this, one artist told me that he used the straight-line tool in Paintbrush to draw curves. I took this as a flippant remark. Techies are always throwing out flippant remarks ~ just enough to clue you in to their superior knowledge, but rarely in a way that actually helps you learn a thing. This time, though, something clicked.

The perils of Bugbones.

But, back to LView Pro...

2009-01-02T12:03:00.000-08:00

LView Pro presented another great learning curve. I installed it by myself, with a great deal of cursing. Since I already had a trial version installed, it was hard to make my machine recognize the paid version of LView Pro. I'll say this for Windows: it has the memory of an elephant. Once a registry key is in there, it's in there! You delete it? Windows recalls it. I got on-line at LView's support forum and found that I wasn't the only one who had that gripe. I sorted through copious numbers of rants, whines, and curses and finally found a halfway answer to my question. It took half a dozen tries, but in the end, LView Pro was installed. Time to make some art!!!

Confessions of a non-techie.

Wires, Chips, Woes, and Klingon...

2009-01-01T07:58:00.000-08:00

No, of course LView Pro wasn't a Microsoft program. That's not what I meant. But I'd already had a taste of what software manufacturers could do to you, and that was Microsoft. Their hi-tech promises expire overnight. Bill Gates could pull the rug out from under any software company any time he wanted. But my feet were also on that rug. One Microsoft upgrade and my hard-bought PC ~ the obsolete dinosaur ~ was a worthless pile of wires and chips. Half of my gadgets would fail. Oh, sure, most of the software makers would scramble around and come up with a new driver or something. But I was the user who had to figure out what made my gadget quit working, what a driver was, where to find one, which one to download, how to install it (and don't even get me started on installation woes). Finding drivers and fixes took searching and searching, poring over smirky tech-forum posts, trying to figure out who knew what, and reading between the lines of a mish-mash of tech jargon that was as incomprehensible to me as Klingon. nuqneH!

Confessions of a non-techie.

(Thanks to Wikipedia for the Klingon word.)

LView Pro... Send me a Disk!

2008-12-31T07:23:00.000-08:00

The LView Pro program itself had some great tools and it was comparatively cheap. Only $50. Compared to Corel and whatever Microsoft offered of the same, that was an incredible bargain. I even paid the extra fee for them to send the software on a disk. I didn't know much about the software game, but I sure didn't quite trust some tenuous string of code to be sent through e-mail. If I was gonna pay 50 bucks, I wanted a solid piece of plastic that I could store in a box on my shelf. If I ever needed it again, I'd know where it would be. You couldn't lose it by hitting 'delete' one too many times. They couldn't log you out of it and refuse to recognize your password. Besides, I knew I could reinstall a really old disk even after software manufacturers called it obsolete and quit supporting it. I didn't trust their judgement on deciding when my property was obsolete. My machine was an obsolete dinosaur. So was I. And I was getting cagy. It was me against Bill Gates. I had been the victim of one too many Microsoft upgrades.

Trying LView Pro

2008-12-31T07:14:00.000-08:00

I agonized over the decision of whether to download LView Pro. The problem was, I could find nothing in the documentation to tell me whether my antiquated system could handle the imaging software. All other graphics editors called for superfast processors. I was short on something: RAM, megahertz, CPU... who knew? These terms were always a little fuzzy in my mind. I took a chance when I downloaded LView Pro. I liked it right away, though. First, it changed the graphical settings on my computer to a much finer resolution. I didn't know how it worked, but I did know that even Windows Paintbrush was suddenly capable of handling tiny little pixels and a blue million colors. I was in graphics-hog heaven. It was Bugbones makeover time!

The perils of Bugbones.

Aspiring for Better Images

2008-12-31T07:08:00.000-08:00

LView Pro came into the picture when I'd just about had enough of Windows Paintbrush. The excitement of using Paint to make big, spidery squiggles was long past. I had conquered the computerized crayon. By hook or crook, over a period days, if not weeks, I had scraped out my flat, ugly little cartoon bug. Bugbones wasn't perfect, but he'd do in a pinch. I uploaded him to my site, rough and unfinished. But I aspired for better. What Bugbones needed was beyond the capability of Paintbrush, default settings or no. My little bug didn't have the polish of nice icons that I saw on other sites. And logo or no, if I meant to have an art site, even a cartoon one, then images were everything. Clearly Paintbrush wasn't gonna cut it. It was time to get down to brass tacks. I needed an art editor. Freeware and shareware were everywhere, but I knew nothing about them. Oh, I had played with shareware that came pre-loaded on my computer. But none of it would work to really tweak and fine-tune images. Through my friends at The Artist's Exchange art forum, I found out that new programs were on-line and free for the taking. LView Pro was the best value, they said.

The perils of Bugbones.

Bugbones and LView Pro

2008-12-30T17:33:00.000-08:00

Making little red balls was an amusing distraction, but soon the new wore off. Besides, the little red balls looked spiffier than my logo! Surely I must rework my logo, in keeping with the three-dimensional sophistication and fine resolution of little red balls. Regrettably, the freeware wouldn't do my Bugbones. It would only do balls. For my next free trial, I muddled through a sea of convoluted and conflicting advice and settled on LView Pro.

The perils of Bugbones.

Little Red Balls

2008-12-30T17:30:00.000-08:00

Little red balls took up several weeks of my life. I kid you not. It wasn't just having to make them. It was having to place them on the page. Placing those red balls took a whole extra line of code and some knowledge of tables. You had to know how to make an image link to make them effective. I had to buy a book for that. But adding red balls to my page was a case of pride, of self-respect, of keeping up with the Joneses. Now, I was flying with the best of them, using freeware to make red balls. Before long, my Bugbones site was covered with them. Surely I was the red-ball queen!

The perils of Bugbones.

Stars Upon Thars

2008-12-30T17:22:00.000-08:00

'Stars upon thars' ~ to borrow a phrase from Dr. Seuss. His Sneeches with stars were the crust of the upper crust. Sneeches without stars were nobody. They might as well go out and eat worms. Stars upon thars is the practical philosophy of web design, and I swore by it. Whatever was the going thing, Bugbones would have it. Bugbones wasn't going to be left out. It wasn't just a case of copy-catting. It was a case of learning by imitation. Nobody really knew what the Web was then, except by looking at what the big guys were doing. I looked at other sites. I read the Webmonkey tutorials. I read a 'Dummy' book. If Dummy said do it, I did it. It's as simple as that.

The perils of Bugbones.

Freeware and Red Ball Gifs

2008-12-30T17:19:00.000-08:00

Freeware! What a concept! The Artist's Exchange, collectively, was my mentor back then. Artists on the Exchange were free with tips, techniques, and advice, and they were all enthusiastic about freeware. They pointed me toward several good programs. One of them featured Vector resizing. It let you make a big, shiny ball. Everybody who was anybody had a shiny red ball on their site in those days. About.com's ball was very prominent. If your links didn't sport 3-D shiny red balls, you were nobody. Well, they didn't have to be red. They could be blue, green, pink, or ~ if you were very edgy and wild ~ purple. Plain-text links? How dull!

The perils of Bugbones

Bugbones: A Cartoon Version

2008-12-27T09:08:00.000-08:00

Making the Bugbones logo in Paint was time consuming and difficult, but I managed a simple Bugbones cartoon. I still wasn't happy, comparing it to other cartoon icons that I saw on-line. The curves were jagged, the colors were harsh and flat. The little Webmonkey was simple but fairly elegant! I knew that a fancy image editor could do the trick, but I was in that all-too-familiar catch-22. My basic image editor couldn't handle the job, but I could not afford to buy the fancy stuff at Office Depot. Believe me, I drooled over versions of Corel and PhotoShop. Then I discovered freeware.

Scrapping the Fossil Logo

2008-12-27T08:16:00.000-08:00

One of the scanned thumbnails of my Bugbones banner idea looked promising. It had picked up the most subtle lines of the gesture drawing. Unfortunately, it had also picked up the background as an opaque off-white. Every line, wrinkle, and stray mark was represented. Dropping in the colors proved problematic. Erasing the white made big gaps. Windows Paint was my image editor and it seemed pretty primitive. I didn't know anything about graphical settings. The pixels were large, producing coarse, awkward images. I was confused by the differences in pixels from one format to another. In photographs, the colors seemed subtle enough. They could be edited pixel by pixel, too, but saving the files caused unwanted compression. File types were limited in those early versions of Paint. It was good for basic forms, cartoons, and outlines. That seemed to fit with what I was beginning to read in Webmonkey tutorials. Webmonkey advised that subtle pinks, creams and beiges wouldn't do the job. These were not "web-safe" colors. Logos and headers should be simple, cartoony, and composed using the limited 256-color web-safe palette. As a matter of fact, I didn't even know how to expand the 12-color basic palette provided by Paint to 256 colors then. If that early version of Paint allowed palette editing, I didn't know how to do it. Thinking back on it, it was pretty naive of me to think I could create that original fossil-inspired logo in Paint, considering the complexity of my design. It would have been better to paint it in gouache or acrylics and scan the final image. As it turned out, Webmonkey convinced me to go cartoony.

Oh, the perils of Bugbones.

Scanning: No Method to Our Madness...

2008-12-26T10:07:00.000-08:00

No, there was no method to our madness in scanner experiments. (Want to know about method? Remind me to tell you about Professor Ziggy and the chocolate-chip cookie recipe.) As a result of our haphazard method, I went home with a hodge-podge of file sizes and types. I had one interlaced .GIF of a painting, "Sisters"; one .JPEG of "Ghost in Pajamas" (a colored pencil illustration); and one I-don't-know-what of Bugbones. (Working with that thing was another story.) After uploading my artwork, I found that I really liked the interlaced .GIF. It made for a cool download! Still, a .JPEG would have been the better choice, I learned. GIFs are better suited for computer-generated images. Alas, we didn't save any images in uncompressed formats. This would impede my options for working with the files. I left Terri's house with three photo files and a covetous desire to own my own scanner. I proudly e-mailed my images to Philip of The Artist's Exchange, and we conversed about art. Then I began my next challenge: uploading files and placing them on my web page.

Oh, the perils of Bugbones...

Scanner Chronicles: To Compress, or Not to Compress

2008-12-26T10:02:00.000-08:00

We soon ruled out the photo file formats we hadn't heard of ~ a wise decision, in my opinion. We were getting to be old hands at Windows95, with enough shiny worn off of our brass to know that if we didn't recognize that extension, chances were, Windows wouldn't either. I knew from reading tutorials, as well as hellacious trials (or mostly errors) that .JPEG and .GIF formats were highly desirable for Web usage, but .BMPs weren't recommended. We did our first scan at 100 percent and were surprised to see the size of the nose on that painted dame! Re-sizing as a visual necessity was a given if we wanted to see more than one eyeball at a time without scrolling. It wasn't hard to resize, but neither of us knew enough about resolution or compression to know that these settings could affect the download speed of a file being fed from a web page. Nor did we know what "interlaced" meant. Of these options, we chose at least one of each, not knowing whether any of them would work for my intended purpose. Thus began my scanning career.

(The perils of Bugbones.)

Let the Scanning Begin!

2008-12-26T09:59:00.000-08:00

Now began the operation of scanning in earnest. Neither of us knew what the heck we were doing, but we were game to try. I was too shy to admit that I wanted to scan a silly black-and-white doodle of a bug for Bugbones; so, I whipped out a photo of one of my acrylic portraits and popped it onto the glass. Immediately, we were faced with an array of puzzling choices. Change resolution? Scan as grayscale? Scan as 12-bit or 256 or 17 million colors? Save as a .BMP, a .GIF, a .JPEG? (which we had heard of). Or a .TIFF, a .JFIF, a .PSF? (which we hadn't heard of). And perhaps a dozen others. Decisions, decisions, decisions...

Oh, the perils of Bugbones...

Rituals of the Non-Techie

2008-12-26T07:00:00.000-08:00

I arrived at Terri's with high hopes. Immediately began the time-honored ritual among stone-age non-techies, of ferreting out various plugs and gizmos, figuring out which one went where, and attempting to boot the machine, while keeping fingers crossed. The big fear was that hooking up more than one piece of hardware at one time would provoke the dreaded growl and threat, "Illegal Operation!" As a matter of fact, this ritual is not limited to non-techies, but seems to be a time-honored tradition among IT professionals, from what I've observed in the offices where I've worked. The thing did boot up, and I looked forward with relish to performing my first scan. My Bugbones logo would soon become a reality.

Oh, the perils of Bugbones!

Trip to Terri's: Scanner, Here I Come!

2008-12-26T00:38:00.000-08:00

My friend, Terri, had been wanting me to take a day off and come for a visit. Now she had the perfect lure. "I have a scanner," she said. "You might come over and use it. I also have a photo-editor. I don't know if that's what you need, but it does some pretty cool things." It's not that Terri actually had to lure me to her house for a visit. It's just that I was working as a temp then, so my finances wavered between flat broke and in the green. When I was working, I had no time for a trip. When I wasn't working, I had no money, and was hesitant to burn a tank of gas for a trip out of town. My '72 Ford LTD got twelve miles to the gallon. A fill-up, in 1999, was not to be taken lightly. It was a life decision. You see how it was. But the lure of the scanner was stronger than the fear of being flat broke and stranded. I filled up that gas hog and hit the road.

Golden Apples

2008-12-24T01:15:00.000-08:00

Before I could get very far into my Bugbones logo design, something new happened. Someone asked to see my art. I had discovered The Artist's Exchange art forum on MiningCo. The guide of the art forum was Philip. Philip was probably my first cyber contact, outside of e-mail. We were discussing some technical point about drawing. Philip said, it might help if he could see what I was talking about. "Scan a couple of your paintings and let me see them," he said. Aha! A task! A challenge to be done in pursuit of the holy grail. "Bring back a golden apple."

"Scan me a painting." I'm not sure I knew what a scanner was. But I promised Philip I would try.

The Perils of Bugbones.

Sketching the Bugbones Logo

2008-12-24T01:07:00.000-08:00

My planned artwork was more in the nature of a page header than a logo (like the toppers of todays' blogs). It was highly decorative and painterly. Right away I found that my rough drawing didn't have the spontaneity of my thumbnails. It occurred to me that I might compromise by scanning the thumbnail and dropping in the color. Once again, the lack of a scanner became a stumbling block, but regardless of which process I used to complete the header, I would have to have a scanner. If I chose to paint the Bugbones header instead of scanning the thumbnail, I would still have to scan the final result to get it on-line. The painted logo would be quicker, and maybe by the time I finished it, I would have enough money to buy a scanner.

The Perils of Bugbones.

Fossils and Myths (Themes)

2008-12-23T15:57:00.000-08:00

Now that I had thrown out the little skeleton guy, Bugbones, I was free to design my site any way I chose. I still planned to keep the Bugbones theme, though. I was in archaeology mode back then. No, I wasn't helping on a dig. Archaeology was an art theme for me. I was exploring ideas of lost civilizations, ancient ruins, evolution, myth, psychology. I wanted to work this into my site theme. My idea was to create a subtle, sophisticated, fossil-inspired drawing of skeletal bug wings with hieroglyphics mixed in, in delicate, creamy beiges and pale, pale pinks. I chose one of my many gesture drawings and began a rough sketch of it.

The perils of Bugbones...

My First Computer

2008-12-22T14:07:00.000-08:00

By now, I had my first computer. It was a hand-me-down with Windows95 and an eight-inch screen. Everybody else was in heat over Windows98 by then, but I was mighty proud of my new toy. I even had the disk and could register my copy. I still didn't have Internet, but I spent many happy days playing with Paintbrush, resetting my Wallpaper, and messing with the control panel. Need I tell you how many times I went into panic mode over some mystical Windows error message? The most terrifying one back then was the warning that I had done an "illegal operation." I had no idea what I had done, but having the application growl and promptly close each time left me feeling properly admonished. Was I a hacker? An accidental hacker? I felt like that blonde moll in the comic strips, who pulled the tag out of the pillow: "Do not remove under penalty of law!" I was looking over my shoulder for the cops every minute. But having a computer meant that I could work on my Bugbones logo at home.

Oh, the perils of Bugbones...

Bugbones: Thinking of a Logo...

2008-12-22T06:48:00.000-08:00

I had my free site and a name. Now I needed a logo for Bugbones. Believe it or not, I first fixated on the idea of my old friend Bugbones, the creepy little skeleton guy. Maybe I was retreating from the challenging tech world back into the relatively safe world of my childhood. Nah, really... I just liked the little guy. It soon became obvious that the little booger just wouldn't do. For one thing, the eight-by-one-inch banner was the standard of the day. The importance of having one was gospel, said whoever wrote the Web Bible. For one thing, it could be used as a banner ad. B-a-an-ner! (You had to have one. Or be stupid.) Well, try as I might, I couldn't make Bugbones into a banner. I couldn't crop him, crunch him, squeeze him, or mash him into shape.

Oh, the perils of Bugbones...

Dot-Com Aspirations

2008-12-21T20:06:00.000-08:00

Yes, I already had aspirations of making my website a... ta-da! Drum-roll please... DOT-COM! Wasn't that what everyone wanted? We were in a thing that didn't have a name back then. We were in the Dot-Com Bubble. Bugbones was a strange but original-sounding site name, chosen on the fly, a convenient way to avoid, at Angelfire, the same frustration that finding a username at Yahoo had been. Here I had chosen my site name in an accidental, offhand manner, only to realize that the name would affect my site content. (I didn't think of it in quite that way. 'Content' was a word that would become thoroughly familiar and important to me in the coming years, when SEO would briefly rule the cyber world. These concepts did not yet figure into my knowledge about websites.) Changing user names wasn't an option, I thought. Angelfire's terms forbid signing up for a second account, and I've always striven to obey the terms and conditions of the hosts I've used. I wasn't too concerned about the fact that my Bugbones site would have my art on it. The site would not be one-hundred percent about my art. It would have humor, cartoons, graphic art and illustration. My site wasn't going to be a resume, it was going to be a newletter with art. Though I did agonize over whether to buy a dot-com and change the name, I knew I couldn't yet afford it. A dot-com was for the future, and Bugbones didn't have to be my be-all, end-all. If Bugbones didn't work out, I could abandon it. If it was successful, just imagine... I could have two dot-coms! What lofty aspirations...

Oh, the perils of Bugbones!

Bugbones the Second

2008-12-20T16:28:00.000-08:00

Bugbones, as I said, was original. Or was it. I do recall that, back in the stone age, some other kid handed me a strange little drawing of Bugbones. I took it up, as kids do, and made it my own. In all those years, I had never asked where that kid got Bugbones. As a budding artist, I was always coming up with original drawings. I assumed that kid did, too. I also borrowed, as the inspiration hit me. It never occurred to me that Bugbones might have a predecessor other than some obscure kid from my grade school, until the day that I went to sign up for my Hotmail account. I'm not sure why I needed a Hotmail account. Probably Angelfire suggested that one should have a separate e-mail address to publish on one's website. When I went to sign up for Hotmail, I was surprised to find out that Bugbones already existed. So did Bugbones1, and Bugbones10, and Bugbones45. "Odd," I thought, and raised an eyebrow. But Bugbones was already my Angelfire username, so Bugbones it must be. I settled on Bugbones2000 in honor of the much-feted upcoming year 2000. The almost-lacking-but-one-year millenium. I liked the ring of it. (That address is no longer mine ~ I let it lapse long ago).

This was my second e-mail address and the Hotmail learning curve was a pain. I don't remember if the problem was a Hotmail problem or a Netscape Navigator problem. I would carefully compose my e-mail. But when I hit send, the thing would go blank. Hotmail would hang and my letter would be lost. This was frustrating and all new to me. I sent in my first support question. It was a cookie problem. I was using a public terminal and taking too long to compose my e-mails. But I was now the grand owner of two e-mail accounts and a free site. I had my own little corner of the Web, my miniature Web presence, all established under the unlikely nickname of Bugbones.

Oh, the perils of Bugbones...

Bugbones appealed to me...

2008-12-19T18:11:00.000-08:00

Bugbones appealed to me. He was my little-child notion of an edgy and sophisticated cartoon fellow. He was cryptic, he was bizarre. Above all, he was gross. Kids love gross. I took to drawing Bugbones with a passion. Notebooks filled with drawings of Bugbones. Slam books of Bugbones. And then, over the years, Bugbones was retired. Bigger and better motifs came to take his place, and Bugbones was relegated to my artist's crypt of old ideas and sketches. I never actually identified with Bugbones. It wasn't my nickname or anything. My picking it at the moment of web page conception was just a fluke. Logging into Angelfire required a user name. Bugbones, lurking now 30 years in his crypt, came creeping out of the cobwebs of my subconscious mind. Original user names are not easy to come by. I like original ones, no numbers. I had plenty of fodder... actual old nicknames of mine, characters I identified with, or just silly bits of conversation that existed in the stock repertoire of my own memory. Bugbones was odd, but it was (I thought) original. True, it might not fit with my eventual goal, of publishing my artwork. But I think by then I already knew that Bugbones would be my teether. I couldn't upload tons of art, I didn't even own a scanner. I didn't even own a computer, for heaven's sake! But I could do Paintbrush files. And I could create funny jokes and stories. Bugbones would suit my purpose. I could do a cartoon site or newsletter. And when the time came to change it, Angelfire's T and C assured, I could choose my own domain name. It could be anything. Yes, it could be anything.

Oh, the perils of Bugbones!

Why Bugbones?

2008-12-19T16:11:00.000-08:00

Why Bugbones? Funny you should ask that. It is an odd name. The legend of Bugbones goes way, way back into the stone age of my youth. Bugbones was a strange little character that I drew when I was a kid. It wasn't even my idea. Some boy had drawn one in school and showed one to me. (Yes, even then little-boy artists were inviting me to come up to the studio and see their etchings. Sometimes I did, too.) Bugbones was edgy. He was wild. He was a strange little skeleton in a stiff, robotic pose. He stood like Michael Jackson, in Thriller: one arm stuck up, one down, kind of pivoted from the elbow. Walk-like-an-egyptian! Bugbones had little cracks running through his bones and skull. And there were bugs crawling on him, little creepy spiders that hung from his limbs. His grin was grim, his nose was hollow. Come to think of it, he really was a lot like Michael Jackson.

Oh, the perils of Bugbones!

Angelfire

2008-12-19T15:32:00.000-08:00

As I said, I burned cyber-rubber on my way back to Angelfire. I wanted that free web page. Wow, it was amazing to me, the thought that someone would be kind enough to give someone a page. Now, you may wonder why I didn't start my first page on Yahoo. I already had their e-mail account. The truth is, I don't know if Yahoo even offered web hosting back then. My information on the Internet and how it works was being assembled in the same fashion as my web page: piecemeal, bit by bit. I added things as I learned of them. The extent of my knowledge about the Internet and how it works was now: (1) You can surf it. Surf, I now knew, meant to click on links and read things. (2) You can search. Searching was a way to find links. (3) You can e-mail. And you don't have to have your own computer to do it. (4) You can get a free website at Angelfire.

Angelfire. The name appealed to me. No, I'm not a terribly religious person. But I am an artist, an idealist, and a hopeless romantic. Angelfire sounded so brilliant, so mystical, so beautiful. Angelfire. And they gave you a free site. What an angel!

Bugbones. My own name sounded so... I don't know. Gross. Ugly. Strange. It wasn't Angelfire...

Oh, the perils of Bugbones!

Angelfire, e-mail and SPAM

2008-12-19T15:14:00.000-08:00

Now that I had e-mail, I could start a website. Man, I burned cyber-rubber on my way back to Angelfire to sign up for that free home page. Well, it might not have been that fast. Actually in the interim, I had spent several weeks discovering that friends of mine had e-mail, and spamming them with a flurry of jokes. SPAM was a new concept. I had not yet been on the receiving end of it. Back then, SPAM was a fairly new concept. There was SPAM, but we were not yet experiencing massive amounts of it. The SPAMbots had not yet begun to devour our free time. Those were the glory days of e-mailing. Then, the spiders were quietly building their web. Still in the creeping stage, they were secretly harvesting e-mail addresses. And they were laying their egg sacs, biding their time. But I was no professional SPAMMER. I was merely a hapless fly. A Bugbones-style splat in the middle of their web. Like all newbies, I sent out my jokes. I once asked a friend if she minded. "Well," she said, "yours are not bad. At least your jokes are funny. I think you must just send the best ones you get." (Yes, I do, preen, preen.) "But it would be nice if you'd send an actual letter now and then." I took her advice, and from there out, I toned down the jokes and sent more letters.

Oh, the perils of Bugbones.

Yee-ha! Yahoo Mail, here we come!

2008-12-19T14:30:00.000-08:00

Now that I knew you could have e-mail without being a computer owner, I was a happy camper. Yahoo! came highly recommended, so Yahoo it was. I found Yahoo and started the process of signing up. Ouch! This would be my first of many more experiences with frustrating sign-ups and log-ins. First came the user names. Taken. Taken. Taken! I soon discovered that you had to be pretty creative about nicknames, unless you wanted to be Joe999999. But it's not too hard for me to come up with creative nicknames. My friends and family have given me a variety of appellations. They love to call me names. After the user name came the frustrating password errors. Four dozen tries. My arms nearly fell off! I started hacking in a frenzy, and voila! Open sesame! Suddenly, I was in! But by then ~ you guessed it. The enchanted password had been anger-driven gibberish. It was a secret password all right. Not even I had a clue. I had a user name and a password, but not a clue as to what the password was. I couldn't ask them to e-mail me a new password, because I had no e-mail. That's what I was trying to get! So, I had to add a one (1) to the end of that coveted first username of mine. And do the whole process over again. Many times, I have envied the person who finally got my first user name when that account probably expired for lack of use. But, no matter. Just think of it. Now I had mail! That mystical critter, e-mail, that I had heard about for so long... All the TV ads: You've got mail! Bling! And now, I actually did have! I e-mailed my friend, Terri.

"Yahoo!" she said. "I'm glad you picked an e-mail address that reflects your mountain heritage."

Oh, the perils of Bugbones...

Bump in the Information Superhighway

2008-12-19T13:58:00.000-08:00

Angelfire required an e-mail account. Letdown! Frown-face! I didn't have a computer. How I envied all of those roadies, speeding down the information superhighway in their brand-new e-Machines! But I had no computer. I was still sitting by the roadside with my thumb stuck out. No computer; hence, no e-mail. (What the heck was e-mail, anyway? Ah, I think surely I knew that much, even then.) E-mail was the thing you got when you clicked that Eudora thingy on a PC desktop, if you had one. But the library computer didn't have that thingy. Or if it did, it was off limits to me. Drat! But at least I could type a letter in Wordpad and print it at the library now. Even that was a great improvement over handwritten drafts or pecking at my early-80s-era electric typewriter (the one that punched holes in the paper). So, I began word-editing with a will. Mainly, I typed letters to send to my friend, Charlene. But e-mail, I did not type. I went to the library and typed letters, or I moped at home. It all seemed so frustrating. Finally, someone (probably that same button-pushing niece) clued me in that you could get e-mail without having your own PC. Off to the library I sped.

Oh, the perils of Bugbones!

The Perils of Bugbones: My first contact with the Information Superhighway

2008-12-17T00:29:00.000-08:00

My first attempt at a web page was Bugbones. Bugbones was my little free site, hosted by Angelfire. Some kid had told me about Angelfire. Probably my button-pushing niece. (How we once rued those button-pushing, videotape-erasing fingers! That kid had to be a byblow of Watergate.) I didn't even have a computer then, but I was determined. If a web page was free, by gum, I was gonna get one. I headed for the public library. No, not the one in my small town. The one in the next town over, the one that's bigger than ours. They had a computer reserved for public-access Internet. Yes, one. An Internet cafe, with one cup of coffee. For a town of 50,000. Information superhighway, here we come! Vrr-r-r-o-o-oom!

Oh, the perils of Bugbones!