Both visitors to Carrying Stones will notice some changes.
Gone is the overgrown path to my writing, which is now featured front and center where it should be. My trials on the web during the past year focused on polishing HTML skills, learning CSS, picking up a little JavaScript and jQuery (with a side of perl), then figuring out where those tools intersect. The result was a mediocre site that only a determined sadist could bring themselves to visit every day. OK, once a week. What? Less than once a month?! Come on!
The journey is more important than the ship.
The astute reader will notice a redesigned keel guiding this ship, so allow me to clear the deck before moving on to reflect on and redefine the purpose of this site. After tinkering with Movable Type for about year, I am giving WordPress a whirl and may switch to yet another platform soon. You may see some schizophrenic changes happening as I settle into my new home. I may talk more about this later for the nerds in the audience, but that’s all for now. The journey is more important than the ship.
Missing the Boat
Jimmy Buffett recorded his story A Pirate Looks at Forty in 1975.
The song contains the bittersweet confession of a modern-day, washed-up drug smuggler as he looks back on the first 40 years of his life, expresses lament that his preferred vocation of piracy was long gone by the time he was born, and ponders his future.
Wikipedia, A Pirate Looks at Forty
As long as we agree to disregard my early days on Usenet, we can agree I have no claim on the pirate’s life. ((I have vague memories of going to bed with a 33.6k Global Village Teleport Modem struggling to download hundreds of segmented files to reassemble in the morning, or maybe that was someone else. Yesterday’s BitTorrent.)) It’s the longing in Buffett’s song that pulls me in with a wish to go back in time to my first contact with computers was the Tandy TRS–80s in junior high school. My first personal computer was a TI–99/4a (should have gone with the Commodore 64) and time was screaming past when I bought my first Mac in 1994, a clumsily-named Performa 6116CD. I was a 22-year-old college English student working full time to support to support my wife and 4-year-old son. My course seemed clearly charted, except it wasn’t. Anything can change if you let it, and all of the signs were there if only I had read them. Here are a few of the beautiful shiny buttons, the jolly candy-like buttons, I strolled past as if they weren’t even there.
- Growing bored with Mac OS 8 and itching for a challenge, installed LinuxPPC (still active as PenguinPPC) on the aforementioned Performa and later migrated to Yellow Dog Linux.
- A preview release of BeOS PR2 was among the software CDs bundled with the Power Computing PowerCenter Pro 210, a Mac clone I bought in 1997. Of course I ran it! Jean Louis Gassée’s folly screamed on Motorola’s PowerPC processors (@gassee still shares his strong opinions on Twitter) and may have overtaken Apple’s OS if not for Steve Jobs’ decision to stop licensing the Mac operating system. Nonetheless, I dreamed of buying a BeBox.
- In 2000, I attended the final Atlanta Linux Showcase toting a new Blueberry iBook (triple booting OS 9, OS X beta, and LinuxPPC no less) before the event moved to Oakland, Cali. I chatted with Eric S. Raymond, saw Larry Wall from afar, and watched what happens when you mix free alcohol and nerds at the after-party hosted by Slashdot.org. A manic performance of a punk-Devo karoake version of Madonna’s “Vogue,” en vogue at the time, is forever burned in my brain. I corresponded with lead developers at LinuxPPC prior to the event and met that inner circle of nerds devoted to running Linux on PowerPC processors, even working with them to write early drafts of documentation. ((The Internet does not forget. I found evidence of early correspondence with fellow PPC pioneers on
comp.os.linux.powerpcfrom 1999!))
These memories begin to illustrate my lifelong interest in computer technology starting as early as computer classes in 1984, ballooning with with my first Mac in 1994, and exploding with my introduction to *nix around 1999. Now, at 41 years of age, I remain what people used to call a computer hobbyist and look back with bittersweet lament that I never pursued those passions as a career. All of my websites since the first hand-coded vanity blog christened in the late 1990s have been experiments; portals for me to learn new things about computers, technology, and the Internet.
The ocean is full of tech bloggers who began building their audience (which included yours truly) while I turned a blind eye to what I wanted to do, instead doing what I thought I had to do. Hindsight reveals I neglected the opportunities of being in the right place at the right time. Maybe sharing my errant past will clear the path for others who feel stuck to know they can change course at any time, a valuable insight I still struggle to accept at 41. As a nerd with a college education steeped in English literature and writing, my secret goal was to build an audience of readers who return because they enjoy what I write. As I breathe, it is not too late for me to refocus on that goal.
Defining a Purpose
It is now clear to me why, with the exception of a very close circle of friends, each iteration has been a failure. Reflecting on my shenanigans on the World Wide Web is akin to looking at photos of myself as a pudgy pale kid bedecked in striped athletic socks up to my knees, or wearing a Jacque Costeau-style diving mask and flippers at the beach, or wearing a sleeveless black muscle shirt in the driveway of my future wife (that part worked out OK bless her heart). My focus has always been more on the nerdery than the writing, though I cannot ignore both passions and promise to stride forward with less navel gazing.
How do I define Carrying Stones? CaSt is the nexus of my love for writing and technology. My influences include a cast of characters ranging from David Foster Wallace to Hunter S. Thompson with special thanks to Patrick Rhone, John Gruber, Merlin Mann, and Dan Benjamin. I am thankful to these mentors whether they know it or not.
This readers’ guide will help you get your sea legs as I continue my journey:
- Carrying Stones—This site, which will focus on the posts I write for readers.
- Terrazzo—My Tumblr blog will host the digital detritus that washes up on my shore (e.g. links, interesting stuff by others, pointers to items of interest).
- Twitter—For personal (usually silly) conversation as @ELBeavers.
- App.net—Staying in touch with my nerd self as @ELBeavers.
I hope you stay with me. Let’s go.
N.B. Looking Back While Moving Forward: I considered wiping the slate clean and moving forward with a fresh start without the broken links and mishmash of prior posts. For good or ill I decided to leave it with this post standing as a totem marking a turning point. Kindly take all past work with a grain of salt.