Encountering my internet past

Nothing can better illustrate the passage of time than the knowledge that you're now on your third domain. But even if your hard disk has crashed, taking with it the remnants of sites past, all is not lost! There's still the WayBack Machine, the amazing internet archive. Sure enough, most of my first site, Me and My Bright Ideas, was captured and is still readable, if you don't mind missing images. (A good reason to use the alt tag!) I built this site when I was learning HTML and, unaware that there was such a thing as an editor, I coded it by hand, character by character. Tedious, but a good learning experience. You can see what's left of it here.

At the same time that I was learning HTML, I was teaching myself Photoshop by illustrating amusing material that I innocently filched from other sites. Courtesy of the WayBack machine, here's my all-time favorite, sans images. It's a collection of answers to Sunday school tests. If your sense of humor is anything like mine, you'll find it hysterically funny.

1. The first book of the Bible is Guinness's in which Adam and Eve were created from an apple.

2. Noah's wife was Joan of Ark.

3. Lot's wife was a pillar of salt by day and a ball of fire by night.

4. Samson slayed the Philistines with the axe of the apostles.

5. Unleavened bread is bread made with no ingredients.

6. Moses went to the top of Mt. Cyanide to get the 10 Commandments.

7. The seventh commandment is, "thou shalt not admit adultery."

8. Joshua led the Hebrews in the battle of Geritol.

9. Solomon had 300 wives and 700 porcupines.

10. Jesus was born because Mary had an immaculate contraption.

11. The people who followed Jesus were called the 12 decibels.

12. The epistles were the wives of the apostles.

13. One of the opossums was St. Matthew.

14. Salome danced in seven veils in front of King Harrod.

15. Paul preached acrimony, which is another name for marriage.

16. David fought the Finkelsteins, a race of people who lived in Biblical times.
17. The Jews had trouble throughout their history with unsympathetic Genitals.

18. A Christian should have only one wife. This is called monotony.

(Maybe I'll redo the graphics for this page; and actually put it up on besidemyself. It's too hysterically funny to consign to bottom of a blog, which is where this post will be some day.)

My next site was built for a little business I started when I was in Westchester (NY) before I went off to manage the Martindale-Hubbell Web site from its lovely suburban New Jersey location. (I didn't much like New Jersey.) The best part of it was a little arrow that flew around the page, but the DHTML seems to have been lost in the archiving, and it now just sits over on the left side of the page, doing nothing at all. But it does occur to me that my fondness for a certain coral color has persisted for some time; it's what I use on the front page of besidemyself.com. Most of the links in the archive still work, and you can take a look at the teeny teeny type I used for this short-lived presence on the Web.

Change of perspective

Today, with projectiles flying from Gaza to Beirut, my most immedite previous post (from May) does not seem amusing.