Southern Muse registered on Feb. 21, 2000

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

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

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

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

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?

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)

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

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

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

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!

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

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.
Philip's art on RedBubble: http://www.redbubble.com/people/mymemine

Topics: Miningco. Philip the Guide. Art Forum.

An Aside to the Guide

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.

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 later 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.

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!

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?

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

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

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...

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.