In passing

Today, my Geocities site, and perhaps millions of others' Geocities sites, some of them maintained and others not, quietly passed into history. The directories were destroyed, and any Geocities link now redirects to an offer for Yahoo! hosting.

Thankfully I was able to mirror my two sites in time (as Yahoo! sent all Homesteaders a cautionary email) and the sites now reside in my personal web space. But what of the others? What about that Led Zeppelin tribute website someone built in 1999 in honor for the first time she heard "Kashmir" as a pirated MP3 on Winamp? What about that site owned by a socially awkward teenage boy, who, since everyone else did, tYpEd LiKe tHiS and listed his top three school crushes but had to give them pseudonyms? (And before you ask, no, I did not do this... ^_^) What about what must have been thousands of resumes, hundreds of cookbooks, guitar tab sites, collections of pictures of precocious dogs, family trees, FAQs, tutorials for obscure programs, and the like, whose owners have moved on to other things like Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter, or who have forgotten that they even had a website on Geocities? All that information--all that knowledge--is gone.

It would be foolhardy to compare the demise of Geocities to that of the Library of Alexandria. But it was the same kind of loss. Supposedly the Library had knowledge about anything and everything the Western civilizations knew up to that point in time, but groups of individuals who were misguided in their ideology (OK, OK, some of them were Christians) felt that its status as a pagan temple trumped its containing precious human knowledge, and so felt the need to take it down.

Similarly, homesteaders were allowed to post whatever they wanted however they wanted on Geocities, so long as you knew HTML and were willing to type into a text box all day to get it. But with the rise of social networking sites, where people are forced into talking only about themselves (and not what they know, for instance, about matrix algebra or what the Eagles were really saying when you played "Hotel California" backwards), Yahoo! had a change of heart:

However, we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways. Beginning on October 26, 2009, you will no longer be able to use GeoCities to maintain a free presence online — but we're excited about the other services we have designed to help you connect with friends and family and share your activities and interests. —Why is Geocities closing?

In short, if you want a "presence online" but are not self-centered, then you're going to have to buy webspace.

To me, the closing of Geocities is an end of an era. When I started my "online presence", I came upon pages upon pages of people who were desperately wanting to share what they knew about the world. Now, I'm not saying that the websites were perfect, either; this was a time in the thick of the Browser Wars, before usability guidelines were agreed upon, and so people used rainbow text colors, large animated GIFs, black backgrounds beneath dark blue text (not unreliable markers for goth/emo sites), marquees, website layouts that shrugged off the boundaries of your 800-by-600 screen, frames vs. no-frames, and so on. (And plus, it was never more true then than it ever was that you shouldn't believe everything you hear on the Internet.) But you got the sense that people cared about what they wrote down, and they wanted you to know also. These were the days of free websites, visible counters, webrings, email pals, and the like, where it was the web developers who decided what you learned about, and when we said web developers, we meant all of us. And perhaps sometimes we talked about ourselves.

But the new paradigm--the new ideology--is to share things about yourself. You are the most interesting person you know... why would you not want to write about it? So the Web of today is cleaner, easier to read, more usable for keeping in touch with friends and colleagues, and a whole lot easier to use.

Perhaps it was a trade-off. But at least in my book, we end up on the losing side.

Oh, well, there's still Angelfire. ^_^ (Wonder when these guys will close, too?)

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Owl City, "Fireflies". I'm gonna write a "Why I like this song" on this as soon as I have time. But I guess you won't see it on Geocities.

P.S. The title of this post links to my homestead
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Code/4023
As you can see, you get the nag prompt to join Yahoo! hosting. I told you they're all gone.

Automotive jungle

Just came from work, and finally had lunch at the Outlets. To me, then, at least, it is weird to come upon such a packed food court.

I value the stability that having a job (maybe I should say jobs) gives me. Fact is, yesterday I was finally able to buy all my books for all my classes. ^_^ It keeps me busy, so that I don't have to be alone with my thoughts all the time, which historically is not the best thing for me anyway. I truly believe that it's a blessing from God that I'm able to do both the things I love to do and the things I have to do.

The last day to voluntarily withdraw from Colleague was yesterday. That means I'm stuck with these classes!

I'm excited that three of my side projects are nearing completion. Hopefully all goes well. I think I have 13 haiku left to write. So here's to getting things done. In contrast, I haven't walked all week... I have to do something about that. Maybe tonight.

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Kenny Loggins, "For the First Time". I have to play this in front of some discriminating executives. Hope it goes well.

The small hours

This week I'm venturing into the small hours again.

I spent every other night of last week awake, without a single drop of sleep while the Sun lurked under the horizon. And today I'm doing it again, this after having been amply reminded of the effects of staying up all night. It was just this last Saturday that I woke up at maybe 8:30 am with an intense throbbing pain in my eyes that wouldn't go away for such amount of time as to almost make me nervous. It was a weird pain: it felt as if my left eye were forcibly jammed into the back of my eye socket and was stuck there, immobilized. Not a pleasant experience... but then again it was an experience that I've never felt before. Never in my earlier exploits with foregoing sleep in years past have I felt that particular pain. I conjecture now that the pain came from my eye muscles which were forced to work overtime that night.

At this point I would counter to myself, "Hey, cut me some slack! I had some things to do." But actually, that's not an issue anymore after maybe about 4:30 am. Because at about that time, if you aren't yet sleeping, that's what you need to be doing. ^_^

I had finally caved in and agreed to teach someone how to play piano. She seems definitely interested, and I am too (I'm really wondering whether I can find a replacement pianist or whether I would earn much money in the process), but the books are yet to get here. I'll have to scrounge around for some books that I used to play from when I was learning piano myself.

I'm going to try and get some sleep now, seeing a how my field of vision is starting to swim slightly, and the edges of my laptop screen start to throb. ^_^

Song in my head: Cyndi Lauper, "Time After Time".
Currently reading: Soseki, The Miner. Partly to enjoy the story, and partly to see whether I should voluntarily withdraw from my Modern Japanese Novel class...

Florante and Laura aren't Filipino

Close to a week ago, Elmo came back from the Philippines, and handed me a copy of a classic book that I've been wanting to read for some time: Francisco "Balagtas" Baltazar's Florante at Laura. Right off the bat I was hooked. It might have been the feel of Tagalog coursing through my mind and coming out of my mouth. That's not to say that it's easy to read aloud. It's got lots of archaic and classical Tagalog words that even my parents haven't heard of!

But now that I am getting by in it, I am discovering how emo it really is. It figures, really... it was written in 1838, right smack dab during the Romantic period (or maybe a few years after... at any rate, it allows for the idea of Romanticism to reach the Philippines). That seems like it's worth writing a paper about. What do you think?

Oh, and yeah, I should be writing more haiku. But I guess I'm waiting for them to write me.

Song in my head: Stevie Wonder, "Isn't She Lovely". There's also the Kris Aquino version.

Nothing, and To kill a mockingbird

Yesterday was a good day to do nothing.

Now don't get me wrong; I did something, but in this case I think that the sum of the things I did amounted to much less than the individual things I did. I mean, sure, I watched TV, and ate lunch, and sat around at home. But I had no net output.

...you know what? It felt kind of good. ^_^

And, I guess, good for nothing.

OK, but I did read a few more chapters of To Kill a Mockingbird. I'm enjoying it mightily. I cannot remember what I was doing the same day lat year, but I am fairly certain that I didn't read any fiction. I'm thinking that this English class is reawakening something in me that I thought was dead for a long time.

When I got to the second to the last page of Regeneration by Pat Barker, I put it down, uneasy. There they were, Rivers writing a report about Sassoon's progress in Craiglockhart, and I was keenly aware of the fact that if I read any more paragraphs in five minutes, Rivers would cease all conscious, observable thought, action,--change. In a sense, he would die, together with Prior, Sassoon, Burns, Anderson, Bryce, Sarah Lumb, and all the other characters. And I would kill them, they whom I have resurrected in my brain so that they could play scenes for both my escape and edification. Pat Barker, like Charles Dickens and Mary Shelley before her, made the dough, but I baked the characters in my own mind. And as a result my Rivers and Sassoon would be different from Jesse's Rivers and Sassoon and from the Riverses and Sassoons the thousands of other readers would have had.

I felt a sense of thrill in this co-creation, this amazingly intimate, unique collaboration between author and reader. In the last four years I have not read a single work of fiction (OK, that's most probably not true, but I cannot remember any) because I thought for a long time that my imagination is dead, or at least broken, and I didn't know how to fix it. As a result I read mostly nonfiction works, like textbooks and instruction manuals. But now I'm thinking about writing a reading list, and commenting on my latest characters.

If this tirade is a bit long, blame Kim. She gave me the questionnaires that gave birth to these thoughts. And I'm glad she did; I hope that this Summer doesn't halt my reading activities. And I guess I'm also glad that Elaine and Jesse own so many classics. ^_^

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: James Taylor, "On the 4th of July". I thought of this song when I read about Prior and Sarah having their moment in the bushes in Regeneration.

P.S. You should really try reading fiction aloud. Sure, it can get tedious, but you're rewarded by hearing your characters talk. I credit To Kill a Mockingbird with bestowing my normal speaking voice with an Alabaman twang for the time being. ^_^