Sam Danielson

Huge link: textfiles.com

Who remembers the days of the BBS, WW4 BBS software, ANSI Art, Demos, the never ending story, .mod music, Fidonet, and Gopher? Long ago in a place not so far away I remember those things. Busy signals and 1200 baud were just the nature of the meduim. Pressing the down arrow would begin the Z-modem transfer of knowledge to my machine, a 286 with 2 megabytes of memory and an 80 megabyte IDE dirve. Then there was Usenet with all it’s uuencoded glory, (you know what I’m talking about) and the only way in was through the local BBS portal. Things have changed a lot since then, mostly for the better, but something is lost.

Is it that I’m grown? Do children still get the same sense of wonder and enlightenment while browsing the advertising driven services of today? The world used to lie beyond a blinking cursor on the dark screen. Is it still all there?

Some of that wonderful old world is still with us thanks to Jason Scott, the SysOp of textfiles.com.

Read Maddox's work on blogs!!!

• I have a habit of posting replies to articles on other blogs. The standard reply form asks for a name, url, and email. Despite having all three I hesitate to leave a usefull, non-spambucket email address and often leave only a fragment of my name. I've been leaving this url now for about a year but it just pointed to an empty home directory with folder icons and periods. I consider it bad form to rip on someone's ideas and then cite myself as an empty home dir so, well, here it is. It's not empty anymore. With a fanfare of crickets I present samdanielson.com.
• Computers are stupid devices and I can't really do anything on them without referencing someone's previous work. Often I can't remember what I did the day before to make my computer work the way it does today. It would be nice to put those long shell one liners, how I installed XYZ, what a Monad is, etc. . . all in one place.
• It's a means of communication which I control. You have to come into my house, so to speak, to converse with me. List spamming is much more difficult with blogs than it is with email.
• I need something to do when I run into a difficult problem. Normally typing "<problem> sucks" into google or alltheweb provides enough entertainment to successfully procrastinate through all usefull problem solving time. Some subjects are either too new or too snobjerk to have enough SEO'd suckage. Learning something new is always hard. If it doesn't suck a little then it's not worth learning. If I say something sucks, what I really mean is that I'm trying to understand it and don't. If something really does suck, I wont mention it.
• I want to endorse the things I like. Money adds, leverage multiplies, and good-will exponents. That's only my opinion.