Random and occasional thoughts on

Many, many years ago, soon after Al Gore finished creating the first release of the internet, I made a few web pages. Nothing fancy, just some text and pictures to prove I could do it. About a year later, I was in a new job and was responsible for our corporate network. As a result, I learned about configuring routers and understanding more about the technologies to access the internet from a corporate network. At my next job a few years later, part of my job was taking care of the servers that maintained my employer's DNS information. That put me in close contact with some of the core operations of the internet. Other than those periods of time, my experience with the internet has been mostly as an end-user. I surf, I email, I game. From time-to-time, I would also dabble in looking up information with a "whois lookup" to find out who was behind a web site, but usually I have been away from the infrastructure of the internet for about 8 years. Having recently regist...

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, I was lucky enough to know someone who had a pre-release copy of a new version of an operating system that was planning on taking over the personal computing world. This was something called Windows and the release they showed me was 3.1 which promised huge improvements in usability and stability over 3.0. It was a rarity in those days, to get a glimpse into software that was "not-quite-finished" but was close enough to get a feeling about it. It was also fun to be on the inside of cutting edge technology. They called it Beta , indicating that is was not yet ready for sale, but was more advanced than Alpha . Beta was usually limited to the employees of the company producing the software and a select group of others. Fast foreword and the Beta versions of more programs started getting wider distribution and the exclusivity started to wear off in some cases. The wider distribution provided the developers more free testers to identi...