The sites may be a little bumpy for a few days. I’m dealing with some security issues and also relocating them (though the URLs will stay the same).
In other words, I’m making my life very complicated and stressful this week in hopes of ultimately simplifying it.
Simplifying email too because it’s become such a non-issue for pretty much anything other than work or bills.
Simplicity is good.
1996 David, meet 2026 David.
The fact that I can’t be bothered to compose a grand nostalgic tome celebrating the 30th birthday of this site (or at least of the site that became this site) suggests that I perhaps don’t care quite as much as I probably should.
Thanks to all of you who are still around, who have talked to me over the years, offered support through major geographic and career changes, a major coupling and uncoupling, a slight case of cancer, the death of two parents, many relatives and friends, and three decades of major tech changes. I’m glad my URL no longer has a tilde in it. And I rather enjoy being an “internet elder” who’s still working in IT and can actually still hand-code HTML if I have to.
It’s been a pretty wild ride, and I’ve been doing this for the majority of adult life, even though I don’t do it much anymore. I guess I’ll keep at it for while. And anyway, the other site is still very active.
That’s how long I will have been doing this come January (though arguably I’ve not been doing much of it for the past ten years or so). I’m not sure if anyone other than me cares much anymore and I’m not 100% certain I care all that much either. It’s just sort of habit at this point.
Maybe I should learn from the Simpsons. Great Pumpkin knows they should have hung it up long before hitting 30…
Anyway, just a thought. And if I stop, I’ll keep it online. And the other site will live on either way.
Did some re-theming tonight connected with all the maintenance and other tweaks. I’ve been needing to do that since the big database crash last year too.
I think it looks much better than It has over the past year, but I really kind of miss the individuality and design aesthetic of the web a couple of decades back. I was doing “dark mode” before it was cool. That said, focusing on content rather than design has its charms as well.
Doing some work on the site (as I mentioned) and I’m restoring a few old posts that never made the transition to WordPress. Today, I bring you Diners, Dives, and Dumps, a short-lived collaboration between my friend Sarah and I in 1997-1999. Sadly, not a single one of these exists in its original form today:
You’re welcome! Enjoy the low-res images.
I seem to be into site maintenance lately.
I’m doing a big project at Groceteria to redesign the store location lists to make them more responsive/device-friendly and also to integrate them more fully into the site search. I’ve also done a lot of theme work there to bring the main site and the message board more in sync.
As for this site, I lost all my tags and categories last year when I had the major database crash, I ended up having to restore the site one table at a time and the tag/category tables just would not work. I decided at the time not to care, but now I’m fixing it (manually) along with years of broken links, some of which date back to when I first migrated the site into WordPress almost 20 years ago. There are almost 3700 posts on the site, going back to 1996, so it may take a bit. (No, I’m not sure why I’m bothering with this site either, but here we are…)
Major database fail. Things may look odd for a day or two. More later…
I did this over at the other site (you know, the one that actually still gets traffic) and I thought it might be fun to do it here too. This is what the site looked like twenty years ago this month, with all its typos and turn of the century elegance. I don’t think it looks too bad in retrospect.
Having arrived today at its 26th birthday, this site has now lasted more than twice as long as my relationship with the city it was originally about. To say that it has changed my life would be a tremendous understatement. To say that it’s as big a part of my life as it once was would be a tremendous overstatement.
In that spirit of laziness, feel free to look at older retrospective (and often self-indulgent) tributes as I cannot be bothered to create a new one this week:
1996. Damn, was I ever really that young?
I thought about letting this post be my farewell to a site that’s long past its “sell by” date. My web presence is officially old enough to have graduated from college and to have lived on its own for a few years. I should probably think about turning its bedroom into a den or a library or a dungeon or something. Otherstream (or its predecessor) has outlasted six cars (sort of), five computers, four addresses, three area codes, two years in grad school, and one husband. All the other blogger kids stopped doing this years ago. And honestly, I mostly stopped doing it years ago as well.
In the past 25 years, I’ve gone from being an underemployed retail manager in San Francisco to a tenured university faculty member and librarian in North Carolina. I’ve successfully negotiated two major medical crises and many major financial crises. How we’ll I’ve navigated the several personal crises depends on your perspective. My hobby is travel now rather than sex. I spend my money on books rather than beer. I like to think I’ve becoming a more interesting and pleasant person to be around even though I was becoming much less social even before it was mandated by the current public health environment.
Most of my creative energy now goes into work and into Groceteria.com, though you can still find my random personal and pop culture sharing on Twitter. I’ve made lots of really good friends here, some of whom are even still around. Thanks!
Anyway, I’m not committing to updating in the future. But I’m also not committing to not updating in the future. I no longer have several hundred people checking in every day like I once did, so I imagine there will not be much anguish and distress either way. It’s pretty much just down to what I care about at this point. And I’m now old enough that I don’t stress over things nearly as much as I used to.
I did the big nostalgia thing five years ago. But I should probably do something to celebrate this time too, right? After all, it is still McRib season…
