I don't think I'd call myself a perfectionist, per se. I've been known to turn in underdeveloped work on a deadline, or even just give in and publish something when I know it's not the best it could be. Sometimes, a project just dies in-media-res and though mine is not the most popular work ethic, I've often found that trying to push these projects is just spinning tires; if it dies, you move on. But sometimes, things move on before you are ready to.
I first got online with BBSes. This would have been 1992-93 or around there (though I'd messed with computers at school and had a TI... yes, a TI). I played doors and exchanged flames over FidoNet, sent in my driver's license so I could wait 10 minutes to look at a RAR-archived .GIF of boobs (Z-Modem, with Chat and Resume!), and learned to program scripts to auto-dial until I finally got through to the multinodes so I could flame people in real-time (but we didn't call it "in real time" then). I had a .QWK-reader and scripted mailruns so I could flame before breakfast.
By the time I figured out FrontEnd and configured Renegade, the BBS craze had died.
I first started browsing the Internet with Netscape. I loved how the cool sites had nifty icons when I favorited them, and how the .JPGs of boobs downloaded much faster (5 minutes!). Chatrooms rocked... until I met some of the people IRL (though we didn't call it "IRL" back then), and "brb" meant "bathroom break" (AFK was "away from keyboard). And you got flamed for "top-posting" in the newsgroups (but they did that on FidoNet too, come to think of it).
By the time I learned HTML and created my first couple of websites using Netscape, everyone was using IE and my pages looked like crap under IE because it didn't use the same tags.
So I started waiting tables and working in bars.
By the time I got back into computers, "brb" meant "be right back"; no one knew what the hell "top-posting" was; all the users with names like hOTchikK36457 were either 15 year-old boys or 50 year-old men (but they probably were on the BBSes too, come to think of it); and you had to spend up to an hour sifting through spam to find the mail from someone you knew. But you could DL movies of boobs -- boobs doing stuff!
By the time I got into Napster, they were already shutting it down and suing folk.
And now, the point:
Have you ever heard of SVG?
The graphics are visually superior to HTML -- clear and high-quality -- but hardly anyone's ever heard of it (that I know of) and Firefox doesn't support it. It just returns an error. Further, while IE and some browsers will automatically show pages in .SVG if it finds them in the folder, it will default to the HTML version if the user doesn't have the Adobe extension installed. Which means that unless you want to turn off your viewers, you need to have an HTML version of the page in the directory, so it never even prompts them to download the reader.
The design program I use supports SVG and I've been using it for a few years now. All I have to do is design the page normally, then I can publish it to SVG if I want. And SVG is visually superior to HTML. But no one ever knew I had SVG files, and I never told them (I'm geeky like that). Oh, I posted about it from time to time, but you know it's different now than it was back in those days: back then, you could expect everyone but the newbies to know what the hell they were doing on a computer.
They knew how to turn it on and properly shut it down, for example. What words like "reboot" and "defrag" meant. What version of Windows they were using. Real die-hard geeks. The common response to any of these questions nowadays is that stupid, shocked, almost offended look -- like you'd just asked what color their stool was this morning -- with the accompanying, "Aw, I dunno nothing bout it -- I just use it to [no matter what they say, the real answer is "look at boobs"]."
By the time I got around to looking at actually purchasing my own domain and hosting services, Adobe quit supporting SVG.
Which isn't really shocking, because no one's ever heard of it anyway.
Heh, I remember those days
Heh, I remember those days too and have heard of SVG but never thought much of it because of its lack of support. Back when I first heard about SVG it was supposed to make downloading times shorter but it worked out people were putting so much detail into their SVG images that a GIF was actually smaller. Netscape rocked, each release brought something shiny and new. Right up to Netscape 3 (gold, with html editing!), then IE blew it away with IE 4 and never looked back until FF came out.
Believe me, people still know about top posting and still complain about it. I expect there are one or two people around here but I won't name names, heh.
My inner geek detoured thru the military
I missed the bbs days. After learning how to program in basic and advanced basic and pascal back in high school and trying to push my TRS 80 along, screaming everytime my magnetic cassette tapes lost a file or got hosed up, I joined the military.
I'd watched that Jan Michael Vincent movie double titled as "Tribes" and "The Hippy Marine". I thought I could go through the military meditating through without it changing me too much.
I was mostly correct. In fact, I even lived in the hippi mecca for a while, Monterey with jaunts down to SF in the early 90's.
But my inner geek ran through its paces on the military equivalent of these bbs, running on Sun systems, Spark(something or other too long ago and too many cases of beer).
When I got out, I headed to college I had gone to school in the military but spent a lot of time in military guided studies, things like enryption and cryptography and battle order analysis. Unless I wanted to go into the hardcore mathematics field, it didn't translate too well and I was kind of young and dumb and full of misdirected energies.
So I decided that I wanted to be a capitalist and went to school for 'business', ultimately double majoring in finance and accounting but always taking all the extra 'techie' stuff I could get my hands into at the time.
Long story short, I learned the language of business and the language of finance and even the launguage of tax and I ultimately became something like an interpreter serving to translate the intentions and specs and requirements of the different business groups Operations, Finance, Tax, IT, Sales etc.
A fast ramp to the top and a little too much intrigue proved to be a cocktail that gave me the luxury of reassessing where I was going with things and so I'm starting fresh, and refocusing on my roots in technology, programming, design etc.
Great article again even with the gratuitous insertion of lots of boobs. Do you get extra blog post points in Performancing for that? :)
Brett
~Sitting in Panera blogging, meeting bloggers for lunch, listening to Neal Stephenson's Diamong Age for about the third time on my treo 600.
Reminds Me of Comic Books
Once the technology for better reproduction became available, the companies invested in them and the increase in consumer price pretty much killed the industry. But that sounds about right for computing.
They actually discontinue support Jan of 07, so I am going to hang at least some SVG pages -- if nothing else, at least 404s. The graphics are really concentrated, just brilliant. Low-res pictures work better than detailed ones specifically because there is no blur. Really sharp.
Tech Geeks Unite!
I got into computing purely innocently: I wanted to do something with my computer and meet other people who wanted to do things with theirs. Like you, I was young and unfocused, and I wanted to dive into every new thing that came along. But with computers now, that "every new thing" is every single day, and it seems to come back to these older systems and formats.
In the dying days of the BBS, there was a flood of mailing programs, transfer engines/protocols (from the sysop's angle), and compression programs. Yet with the Internet today, we use Z-modem transfers and ZIP or TAR -- the standards of the BBS days.
I don't know if SVG will ever become widely-used, but if it does, it will probably have lost its meaning -- having been integrated into some larger system or function.
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