I’ve just joined LinkedIn because now “everyone” seems to be doing it. Which I guess is increasing their value quadratically, or at least by N log(N), depending on who you believe. Funny, now that I’m in a three-person company instead of a 70,000-person company, networking seems much more important!
I’m pleased to announce that I’m helping to start a new company called Jackson Fish Market. The name is a bit odd, but it was the only remaining .com name in English, so we took it. (Just kidding.)
We are trying to be pretty transparent about the startup process on our blog, so go ahead and subscribe, and you can follow along as we learn.
As close followers of my About Me page will have already noticed, I have left Microsoft. My departure is completely amicable. I was looking for a change of project, and in the process I realized what I really wanted was a bigger change than that. So I gave notice a few weeks ago and have been on vacation since then, thinking about what to do next.
One thing I need to do is write more blog posts. This is pathetic. 
Aside from that, though, I will have another workplace soon. Stay tuned for more.
Executive summary:
I am about to shut off wsmith.best.vwh.net. Please fix links if you have any.
Long-winded nostalgic ramble:
More than ten years ago, I signed up for my first web hosting account. I went with a local ISP called Best Internet Communications, which occupied a retail storefront in Mountain View, California. I imagine that at the time there were very few other places in the world where it would make sense to open a retail storefront selling TCP/IP connectivity.
I picked Best because it was very geek-friendly and they provided BSD Unix shell access as part of their hosting plan. It was very handy to be able to telnet to shell.best.com and get a “second opinion” about whatever weirdness I was seeing from my desktop machine. (Even after they moved us all to shellx, an SGI machine running Irix. Weird Unix, but four processors, cool!)
The company was tiny, and it was easy to communicate with the people who actually got stuff done. Maybe too easy…I remember a lot of flaming between customers and employees on the internal usenet groups.
Anyway, when Internet access started to appeal to more than just geeks, Best hit the big time. They merged with Hiway, then were acquired by Verio. My (pathetic) website moved from http://www.best.com/~wsmith to http://wsmith.best.vwh.net. The geek-friendly nature was replaced with Giant Faceless Corporation. I kept paying my monthly fee because I’m incredibly lazy, even as the going rate for hosting dropped to about a tenth of what Verio is charging.
I’m happy to report that Google has finally noticed my redirect to this new, spiffier, readably-named site, so it’s finally time to cancel my Best–I mean Verio–account. If you have old links to my site, please fix them up.
You can take a virtual tour of the fabulous Best facilities courtesy of Matt Dillon.
For the geek-friendly ISP of today, try Speakeasy.
It’s been a long while since I looked at the HL2 mod scene. I guess that explains why Garry’s Mod got to version 9 before I heard of it. This is not technically a game, but it’s much more fun than any mod that is a game. I won’t try to describe it because that would just make you take longer to download it. Go get it. Don’t forget to press Q.
As predicted by James Oberg in his fine article Seven myths about the Challenger shuttle disaster, the New York Times continues to propagate the myths in their homepage blurb at right—though they only had room to include two of them.
As Mr. Oberg says:
The flight, and the lost crewmembers, deserve proper recognition and authentic commemoration. Historians, reporters, and every citizen need to take the time this week to remember what really happened, and especially to make sure their memories are as close as humanly possible to what really did happen.
Hello, and welcome to my tiny corner of the Interweb.
I put up my first home page in 1996, and updated it maybe four times in the ensuing nine years. I guess I just didn’t want to entrust all my valuable thoughts to the 1.0 version. After devoting so many hours to putting everything on my Gopher server, I didn’t want to get burned again. But now that the Web 2.0 upgrade is finally out, I’m taking the plunge. I’ve even started one of those blog thingies.
There are currently two fabulously-exciting things to do on this site:
Oh, and you can also check out my pictures on Flickr. Here’s a preview:
I am now the proprietor of the Newton Museum, which someday will provide better web access to the collection.
Here are some articles and papers about Newton OS written by various members of the Newton team.
Also try your favorite search engine to find various archives of Newton info. There are several out there.
