Tag: Wayback Machine

Words in a very long row

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments
The final update from Mad Blog Media circa 2000. | Screen grab from the Wayback Machine.

Ken Layne at Desert Oracle Radio throws a bonus bone to his Patreon supporters now and then, and the latest was a podcast about his early adventures in bloggery, with one of his old running mates, Matt Welch of Reason magazine and the podcast We the Fifth.

Back in the Day™, when Layne and Welch were building their online presences, they were basically trying to find a new way to do The Work, have fun, and still get paid. They may still be looking. The experience “left both of us semi-internet famous and broke,” quipped Welch.

Me, I was just looking for a publisher-free zone where I could have the occasional public argument with the Voices in my head without frightening anyone’s advertisers.

“That? Oh, that’s just him being him. No, we’ve looked into it, and the Constitution and the ACLU both say he can do that. It’s kind of like the smellies at the off-ramps waving their cardboard signs, except he spells all the words right and he’s not asking for money.”

I’ve lost track of the precise timeline, but the Wayback Machine shows examples of prehistoric TrogloDogS(h)ites dating back to 1998, when I was but a baby blogger cooing and gurgling at the world via satellite Internet from our hillside hideaway in Crusty County.

But there were even earlier versions, long gone off the back and into the broom wagon. I know this because their URLs are in the copyright notices I attached to everything I wrote for the paying customers back then. The hosting outfits were small-timers in central Colorado, most of them no longer with us, and not even the Wayback Machine can find their bones.

I first mentioned a Mad Dog Media website in a 1997 column:

My very own Mad Dog Media Web site lets me slip the leash of conventional publishing and run at large, watering all and sundry with no regard whatsoever for the dictates of good taste or profit margin. Stuff that no one in his or her right mind would publish finds a home here.

—Patrick O’Grady, “Mad Dog Unleashed,” Bicycle Retailer and Industry News

In addition to wanting my own pot to piss in, there was an issue with boredom. The hours can pass very slowly indeed when you’re perched on a rocky hillside 10 miles from a town with no stop lights, more cows than people, and more churches than bars. I was traveling less than I had been when Herself and I did our first tour of Bibleburg in the early Nineties. Back then I’d dash off to Boulder to help VeloNews and Inside Triathlon with production, or venture further afield to cover races, trade shows, whatever. And the races were a lot closer when we lived on the Front Strange. Moving to Crusty County added about 150 miles to every round trip, so I made fewer of them.

Finally, the Crusty County cycling community was basically me, myself, and I. The Voices needed more of an audience than that.

So, yeah: Blogging. My toolkit included (in addition to the attitude and analog-publication experience): PageSpinner, Netscape Navigator, Photoshop, and Fetch; a series of analog and early digital cameras from Pentax, Canon, Sony and Epson; and Macs of various shapes and sizes, among them one of the ill-considered MacClones, a Power Computing PowerBase 200 that I described as “possessed by devils,” because it was.

I taught myself some extremely basic HTML and bounced the blog around those bush-league ISPs before killing off that model in February 2000 (bloggery from the remainder of that year and all of 2001 has gone walkabout); sampled just about every free prefab blogging package available; even tried a self-hosted WordPress build for a while. Then you lot decided you wanted to be able to comment on posts, and on comments, and on comments about the comments, and the simplest way to get all that was to hand the whole shebang over to WordPress.com.

So here we are.

It’s been a fair amount of labor just to run my mouth to no particular purpose for 26 years. But unlike a lot of other refugees from straight journalism, I never thought about trying to make it pay, not really. That would’ve added a whole new degree of difficulty: charging a membership fee; selling advertising; signing up with (and giving a cut to) Patreon, Medium, or Substack; doing some tip-jar beggary like Charles Pelkey and I did for Live Update Guy; and relentlessly self-promoting on social media (“Hey, lookit me, lookit me, LOOKIT ME!!!”).

Anyway, I was already earning something resembling a living by acting the fool for VeloNews, BRAIN, Adventure Cyclist, and anyone else who could stand the gaff and write a check that wouldn’t bounce. And some days that could really feel like work. I felt that if I started to charge admission to the blog, it would turn into a job, and I already knew how that sort of thing ended. Badly.

I may not get paid for this, but I derive other benefits from the work. It keeps me engaged with the world, however distasteful that may be at times. Some people like it, and even say so, in public. And it keeps the rust off this old pen that some folks think is mightier than the sword, possibly because they’ve never fallen afoul of an angry dude with a sword.

At times blogging feels like a training ride on the bike, taking photos that never make it out of the iPhone, or thumb-fingering my way around some John Prine tune on the guitar. How do you get to Carnegie Hall, or anywhere else? Practice, practice, practice.

I’ve been practicing bloggery for a quarter-century now. Who knows? One of these years I might just get it right.

Rock ’n’ roll

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

Your Humble Narrator on the job in 2015. …

I’ve done a number of questionable things for money, but the only one with any staying power was journalism.

Earning power? Well … not so much. Especially after I left the newspaper to hang out my own shingle back in 1991.

Still, like crucifixion, it gets you out in the open air. Here’s your rock, there’s your hill, what’s your hurry?

I finally left that rock at the bottom of the hill about this time last year, and I can’t say I miss rolling it. Both rock and hill had shrunk over the years. But so had the pay. And the people who owned the hill at any given moment still seemed to think they were doing you a favor by letting you roll that rock.

“Well rolled indeed!” they’d exclaim as you reached the summit, gasping for air. “Sign here. And here. And here. And here. Yes, payment 30 days after publication as specified in the contract. Did we mention we’ve rewritten the contract? No? Well, we have, in Cretan Linear B this time, and I’m afraid we can’t cut you a check until you’ve scrawled your X on that old bottom line.

“Oh, dear, rock’s rolled down the bloody hill again. Be a dear and fetch it, won’t you? And do have your attorney or shaman or whomever look over that contract. Ta.”

Lacking professional support I eyeballed that contract myself and came away thinking the rock looked pretty good right where it was. It still does.

Doesn’t mean I’ve quit rolling rocks altogether, of course.

… and off it, as 2022 limps to a long-overdue finale.

Many years ago, between paying trips up and down the hill, I acquired my own tiny mound on the Innertubes and in my spare time nudged the odd pebble up its gentle slope. Strictly for giggles, mind you; if I were to charge admission it would feel like work.

I think I started blogging on AOL in the mid- to late Nineties; for sure I was doing my own self-hosted thing on a succession of small-time ISPs by 1999. The Wayback Machine has a capture from December 2000 that shows a visitor counter which started tallying the rubes a year earlier.

So, yeah. I’ve been at it for a few years, and I’m not giving it up. Not this year, and not next, Dog willing and the crick don’t rise. The bells and whistles come and go — the cartoons, the videos, the podcasting — but the blogging remains.

Who knows? It may just be The Next Big Thing.

But even if it isn’t, my thanks to all of yis who have gathered upon the hill — and who keep gathering, against your better judgment — to watch Your Humble Narrator perform his one-man, dinner-theater production of “Bowling with Sisyphus.”

I know, it’s only rock ’n’ roll. But I like it.

Huevos del Rancho Pendejo

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

This egg cooker is seven years younger than I am.
And unlike me, it still works.

With the Supreme Court slamming the Wayback Machine into overdrive, hellbent for the good ol’ Dred Scott days, it seemed appropriate to fiddle with some obsolete technology here at El Rancho Pendejo.

So yesterday I gave my G4 AGP Graphics “Sawtooth” Power Mac (1999) a brand-new LG monitor. The Mac has a DVI-I port, the monitor has an HDMI port, I had a DVI-D-to-HDMI cable, and somehow it all works, smoove like butta; go figure.

Afterward I broke out the Bloo Wazoo (1980s-vintage 7-speed, single-ring 105) for an enjoyable hour of trail riding.

And today we test-drove a vintage Sunbeam automatic egg cooker (1961) that Herself unearthed at an estate sale. We were a little light on water the first time around but the second go was spot on.

When that cooker was brand-spankin’-new, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a 28-year-old research assistant with the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure, having been rejected for a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter on the basis of her gender.

I wonder how she feels about seeing that rear-view mirror turn into a windshield. Probably feels like boiling somebody’s huevos, is my guess.