Tomorrow's project will be configuring tighter rules for alerting that will go right to my phone via a text message (I only want the really critical errors to come there) as well as automatically open up a helpdesk ticket. I also began sketching out a new server inventory which I will need to put into Sharepoint along with some other documentation.

It's a fairly slow time right now, and since I've gone to work in academia I've really enjoyed the ability to set things up the right way, rather than rush from fire to fire like I had to do in startup-land. That's not to say that I don't miss some of the fun of being in a startup - I worked with some absolutely brilliant people at Grid, and I really miss spending time with them and having debates and conversations about tech.

I also found a piece of software which, so far, has helped me a lot. My desk is right outside of the office that the desktop support folks work out of, and there's a lot of traffic in and out of there. It's very distracting to be troubleshooting some server or network problem and hear people BS'ing with the desktop folks. Since my desk is actually in a really nice space (although it's a bit small) and there's political reasons why I can't move into an office, it's become imperative that I find some way of isolating myself. Well, besides the big frosted Japanese privacy screen that I set up in front of my cube, I found an OSX White Noise Generator, Noisy. I have it set to generate pink noise at about 10% of my iMac's volume. It's a small app that I just keep open on my second monitor and jack up the volume if someone starts talking loudly or I really need to focus.

I still miss working with Jae, even if he was noisy.

The picture is of my Touareg (the 'egg) at the Forked River Mountains.

We decided to keep it pretty low-key. We went out to dinner at the Lambertville Station, where, incidentally we ate for our 3 year anniversary. The food was good - perhaps not worth the 1.5 hour drive each way, but good none the less.

The highlight of the evening was getting their "100 Year Flight of Port." Basically, it's four 1.5oz glasses of 10 year, 20 year, 30 year, and 40 year port. Now, I'm not a huge fan of port, but it was definitely interesting to drink a wine that is older than you are.

Next week I am off from work on vacation. Hopefully I will be able to blog a little bit more. There's a lot of things that I've been meaning to write on here.

I grew up during the waning years of the USSR - back when the thought of a nuclear attack was still a concern, but much less likely. America was strong - nobody was really a threat to us, and those who were a threat (the Iran hostage crisis) weren't really something that everybody worried about. The economy was booming - except for the S&L failure, which didn't seem to affect my seven year old self or my family at all. The only thing that I noticed from that was that a former bank branch became a Chinese restaurant.

9/11 happened, and the economy slowed. I got laid off from VPI and spent the remainder of the summer and fall in an alcoholic haze with Jay, not doing much besides sending resumes, surfing Monster, and playing paintball in the woods on Fischer Boulevard behind Mugsys. There was the threat of the "next attack on American soil" which sort of hung over like a specter, but even then did not really keep me up at night. I suppose that, had I lived or worked in New York in September of 2001, or had I known anybody who died in the WTC attacks I might have felt differently.

Seven years later there's still the threat that terrorists pose. We also have Iran which may or may not be building a nuclear device which certainly would be used to attack America. The news today is that North Korea is taking the seals off their reactors and that they don't care about being labeled a state that supports terrorism. It's either a negotiating point or another vector of attack for people who don't like America.

The headlines are all screaming about the economy. Giant banks - the pillars of the American economy - are teetering near collapse. AIG was just bailed out. There's a $700B plan stalled in Congress to "rescue" the economy that is being drawn up by the same people (Republicans and Democrats) who were incompetent enough to let the country get to this point. My house has lost $50K in equity in the last year. Record numbers of houses are being foreclosed on. Record numbers of people (myself included) are one or two paychecks away from disaster. One of my friends who works construction has been out of a job for a month. There's the ever present worry that the layoff I had in 2001 will repeat itself in 2008, and I'll be scrambling to find some way to keep my head above water and pay the $1600/mo or something needed for COBRA.

My daughter is two and a half. She wakes up innocently each day, heads into the living room to play with her toys and watch cartoons. She knows nothing about the people in the world who wouldn't think twice about blowing her up with a car bomb to make a political statement. She knows nothing about the impending collapse of the economy, the lowering value of the house, or the rising prices of groceries.

I have to wonder if the world is getting more complicated (and dangerous), or if my perception of all of the bad things going on is just increasing as I get older. There hasn't been a day that goes by in the last two weeks that I haven't worried about the future - the collapse of the economy, and the very real threat that myself and my family could be homeless and standing on a soup kitchen line with hundreds of other people. I don't know if I can blame the situation in the world on Bush (which would be a convenient label to stick on everything) or if it's just the inevitable conclusion of the way things have been headed for generations and generations.

All that I know is that I am terrified of the future.

I remember the day I got my first modem. I was a freshman in high school and somehow I managed to save up enough money for a Best Data 14.4 ISA modem. I installed it in my ALR 486SX/20 and loaded the floppy disk for Prodigy. I signed up for an account and used it for a few times, not really knowing what I was doing. A classmate then told me about another online service... a BBS. Unlike the primitive graphics of Prodigy, this was totally text based, but it was easier to navigate and understand. I fired up whatever the terminal emulator was in Windows 3.1 and dialed the number that he gave, and connected to The HoT SpoT BBS in Long Branch.

I signed up for an account using my real name - a terribly newbie mistake, and navigated around the BBS for a little while before my "time limit" expired and I was kicked off for the day. The HoT SpoT was a multi-line BBS running MajorBBS, which allowed it to multitask and hence let callers interact with each other. The sysop of THS was Terry Perkas, a Monmouth University student who's parents owned a diner somewhere up in North Jersey. To get more time on THS you would have to buy credits -- N number of credits was equal to X number of minutes. From THS I branched out to other local boards - The Twilight Zone, Ironhorse BBS, and a host of other boards.

The best part about the BBS's was that the people you'd meet were local. I was one of the very few people from my school who went online, but I met a number of kids from Ocean Township High, Wall Township High, and Long Branch High. We were all the usual socially awkward computer nerds, but it amazed me to see how these people acted online. What we take for granted today - the concept of people's online persona being radically different than their real life persona - was something new (to me, at least) then.

Being a broke kid, it was hard to afford credits for the site. I eventually became friends with (read: kissed the ass of) Terry, and would pester him for free credits. I befriended a lot of the other sysops -- I got "elite" access on a few of the local pirate boards. On other sites, I had unlimited downloads of shareware. One site let me become co-sysop, and I was responsible for validating all of the new uploads, scanning them for viruses, and adding the board's FILE_ID.DIZ file to each of them. There was a connection between all of us online -- something that's hard pressed to be found in most web boards or chat rooms.

Then, in late '95 the Internet hit Monmouth County. Monmouth Internet (now Monmouth Telecom) opened, and offered shell and SLIP access on their BSD box. I found them by seeing an ad in the Asbury Park Press. I signed up for an account (I was bruset@monmouth.com) and through some fluke of their billing system was never charged for more than 3 years. Around the same time, the Asbury Park Press opened up InJersey.com. This was a combination BBS/PPP internet gateway. Many of the kids from THS and the other boards flocked over to InJersey, which was free. I loaded Trumpet Winsock on my PC (now a home built 486 DX2/66) and fired up Netscape Navigator .99N and was transported to an entirely new world.

Web 1.0 killed the local BBS. For a time the local BBS's resisted the change by claiming the same things that I now think were great but previously thought were dumb -- a sense of community, speed of communications, friendships, etc. Boards either had to change or die, and sadly most of them did the latter. THS, feeling the squeeze, bought the module that would allow for incoming telnet requests to be handled by MajorBBS (later upgraded to Worldcomm), email (username@bbs.hspot.com), and I think even newsgroup access.

By the end of 1996 I was mixing my time on Monmouth Internets shell (shell.monmouth.com) and their PPP connection. I also surripticiously used a router at Monmouth University that was set to allow dial in access to telnet out to other sites (the odd BBS, MUDs, etc.) I befriended a girl, Meredith Borakove, who went to school at UPenn, who taught me rudamentary HTML. (She was also the first person I met who used a Mac outside of the writing lab at Monmouth Regional.) Meredith had a personal website (Meredith's World of Queso), the concept of which absolutely fascinated me. Here was the ability to inexpensively make a presence online. Fortunately, Monmouth Internet offered a whopping 10MB worth of space for web pages on their shell box, and I quickly took advantage of it.

Web 1.0 -- maybe this all predates Web 1.0 -- was an interesting time. For the first time people from disparate geographic regions were able to talk to one another freely (as in beer.) The barrier to entry was still very high - connections were hard to find, and most people on the 'net at that time were from academia, so the collective IQ of the bunch was higher. Things would affect the community as a whole. If Mae East was having problems (and when was it not?) the Internet was insufferable. When the Communications Decency Act passed in 1996, everybody turned their homepages black in protest. Everbody had the EFF's Blue Ribbon Campaign logo on their site. We all bult sites for Netscape browsers, listening to MP3's on Winamp.

I'm not really sure what killed Web 1.0. Maybe it was when AOL allowed their userbase to go on the internet at large and post in USENET. Maybe it was when Windows 95 hit, and the Internet Browser Wars took off. The more people that went online, the less of a personable place the web became. By the late 1990s, high speed internet had taken off. Wired Magazine was the hottest thing out there. The revolution happened. And then the tech bubble burst. All of the kids who grew up on BBS's and were in the right places with the right startups made (and mostly lost) their fortunes. The web became a darker, more cynical place as corporations took over.

The web of today is sterile and clean. AJAX has taken over, and the personal homepage has been replaced by the blog or Twitter feed. I never ran a BBS (although I set many of them up locally on my PC), but today I run a fairly large (larger than The HoT SpoT BBS was) online community.

There are days when I look at my PuTTY window and dream:

[bruset@atsion ~]$ telnet bbs.hspot.com
Trying 216.35.197.68...
telnet: connect to address 216.35.197.68: Connection refused
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused

*sigh*

Here's to The HoT Spot, InJersey, Terry, Meredith, the kids who ran the pirate Oblivion/2 boards, and everyone who made Web 1.0 possible. Godspeed.

I'm sure I could have found some adventures taking the Jeep out by myself, but with Laura and Dana in tow it would have just been ugly.

Now, of course, I want to get in my Jeep and drive across the plains. I want to visit the site of Sitting Bull's cabin. I want to go back to Keota and Buckingham, in the Pawnee National Grassland in Colorado, and take in the surroundings again. There is something incredibly powerful when you look across the plains and see nothing - just miles and miles of grass blowing out to the horizon. When you're the only person around for miles. As much as I love the Pine Barrens, you can never get that far away from everything. Even in the middle of a cedar swamp, surrounded by hummocks and briers so fierce that you need a machete to cut through them, there's always something to remind you of humanities presence. A mylar balloon or a long abandoned tree stand loudly exclaims to the "explorer" that there's no uncharted territory to be found.

Frazier explains that the land and resources in the plains were so abundant - and cheap - that it didn't make sense to tear down the old and replace with the new. Unlike Manhattan, where buildings go up, live their lives, become obsolete, and get demolished, the plains holds structures, towns, that outlived their usefulness years ago and now just bake, unused, under the sun. In Jersey, the ghost towns we have only still exist because they're on protected land. If the Pines weren't protected, Harrisville or Martha would probably house a Wal-Mart and a Super Stop & Shop. In Jersey we force our conservation - in the plains it happens because it's just not worth it to build.

Some people may only see the plains as a lonely stretch of land between New York and San Francisco. From Google Earth, the Oklahoma Panhandle is wormwood, defined by thousands of green circles made by center pivot irrigation.  It's a landscape so unlike what I'm used to in Jersey. It's an amazing place. This book makes me want to see more of it.

I'm an amateur historian, so I spend a lot of time looking into the past. Part of looking into the past is field work - in my case, going out into the Pine Barrens and exploring where these ghost towns were. Another big part of that is doing research. What was this town? Who lived there? How does that place fit into the broader context of the region?

The Pine Barrens historian is lucky in some ways, and unlucky in others. From the 1920's through the 1960's, a historian and folklorist named Henry Charlton Beck spent a lot of time in the region, documenting the history and culture of the Pine Barrens. He saw things that don't exist anymore, and in a lot of ways, he paved the way for other historians through the ages (myself included) to follow on through his research. We're lucky because of all of the places in the United States, how many have had generations of historians doing research? I'm sure there are dozens of cellar holes and half-hidden clearings in the wilds of Pennsylvania, or Oregon, or wherever that nobody knows about. The people who lived there are long dead, and nobody cared much to archive the knowledge of the place.

The thing is, we only know the history of the Pine Barrens through the context of those who documented things. So while Beck was a great folklorist, he didn't spend a lot of time describing cellar holes, or what he found at his forgotten towns. He described the people who lived there, maybe a short anecdote or two, and not much else. Historians who have followed since have documented things better or worse depending on their own interests. Right off the bat we don't have an accurate historical record anymore.

Maybe that's the problem with history? How faithful are our archives - our history - of things when we gloss over the mundane and the humdrum and focus on the more exciting things? Are they intrinsically worth more? Of our past, what is worth saving? Will there be some future relative, two centuries from now, who will wonder what I ate for breakfast today, December 28, 2007?

I also wonder about the trend towards digital archives. My website is a pretty useful research tool for those interested in the history of the Pine Barrens. There's a lot documented there that isn't mentioned in any book. Personal stories that are fascinating, but would never be published. How do you go about archiving a website for scholarly use five centuries down the road? Sure, you can say that the Internet Archive project spiders sites and saves them, but the IA has problems fetching old versions of my site from 2002 -- can we trust it to be useful in five hundred years? Would anybody have a HTML browser in five hundred years? Will people even know the HTML specification then? If the answer is no, then what we have is a lot of history held in a very transient medium, that will likely not be accessible to anybody in the future. The problem is, however, that websites generally don't translate well into other mediums. So, what do you do?

One of the things I want to do is research my family tree some more. I've not really been able to trace my ancestry back further than 1860 or so, which in my opinion is terribly recent. Is my family information gone forever? What about the lives of my ancestors in the 1600's? If there is no record of them, what of their lives? Were they spent in vain, only to serve as breeding stock for the next generation? What about their hopes, dreams, and fears?

I've been meaning to sit down and document my life for Dana. Not to be pretentious, but because there's so many experiences that I've had - good and bad - that it might be good to write them down, and maybe after I'm gone, some ancestor of mine will come along and be interested in my life. The question I wrestle with, though, is what medium do I use? I would love to install a copy of WordPress on a local server and blog my way through my life. The problem is, of course, the transient nature of web published data, as well as the danger of hard drive failures, fire, etc. I could write, but again, a fire could come along and destroy my journal. Plus, handwriting is not really in a friendly format for future researchers. I could make up a bunch of Word files, get a Mozy account, and back them up somewhere -- and maybe that's the best idea, although who knows if MS Word will be readable in the future, and I can't stand writing in a plain text editor under Windows.

I like to think that I'm not alone here. We all, in a way, live our lives in bubbles. If people wrote more, documented more, left more for their future, it not only would put our lives in the best context of all - our own - but preserves what we all do, what we live for, for future generations. I don't want to be a name and a date on a family tree in five hundred years. I want someone to know about my experiences growing up, my impressions of things, my mode of thinking.

Those who read my blog and don't check the other site may want to click this link if they're so inclined.