My Internet Journey

Sunday, August 4, 2024

I remember the first time I touched a computer. I was in my early twenties and worked as a customer service rep for the local water company, which was a fancy way of saying I played in the mud nearly every day.

The company had just switched over from a paper and pencil method of recording meter readings to a hand-held reader, which would be connected to a computer after reading a route for the day to upload results. It was a lot faster and saved the meter readers from having to take a bunch of books with them on their routes each day.

As a CSR, I had to be able to lookup a customer information, such as when they last paid their bill, the meter readings for the last number of months and so on.

Lou Plummer’s post about a computer being a hammer reminded me of how scared I was to touch the thing, worried I would somehow mess something up and cause everything to crash. But I learned it, and soon found it to be a useful tool.

Fast forward a few years. I decided that playing in the mud was not something I wanted to do for the rest of my life, so I pursued learning accounting at one of those fly-by-night technical colleges that were prolific in the early nineties. This is where I learned to type by touch – a skill a lot of people could still use to learn.

After graduating the tech college, I landed an accounting job at Guitar Center corporate, which you’d think would be a musician’s dream. I found it to be boring with little opportunity for creative expression. After moving from accounting to the inventory management team, I first got my hands on a Mac SE.

I would travel to the stores across the country and inventory their hardware and accessories. The Mac SE was used to reconcile the serialized product they kept on 3“ x 5” index cards to our inventory sheets. This is where I learned 10-key by touch. I also learned how to use MacPaint and Excel to create flyers for the band I was in.

I went on to another company doing clerical that also gave me access to a Mac. This is where I started helping others with their Mac problems. What they didn’t know is I was figuring it out on the fly, learning as I fixed their computer. I have a mind for problem solving, so I looked like a hero to my coworkers. I was still doing band flyers with MacPaint and Excel too.

The staff design artist decided he wanted to move on. He and I had established a rapport with each other as Mac bros, and when he left, I just sort of fell into his position. This is how I moved from accounting to design. The company was generous enough to send me to school where I got my degree in design. My new career path gave me full-time access to a Mac. I was in heaven. This is when learned the fine art of FTP.

I started hearing about this thing called the internet, which led me to sign up for AOL for a while. I moved on to eWorld shortly after. I still think eWorld was way better than AOL.

I somehow stumbled on this thing called FidoNet that is a network of individual computers. I began running my own Heremes BBS on a discarded Mac SE and put it up as a node the FidoNet network. I was finally online and had access to my own personal email. I’d tweak settings endlessly, learning about communication protocols. The year I ran that BBS was one of the most enlightening in my tech journey.

After that, I moved to an online internet provider named Z4 Internet that gave me a place to host my own web pages. This is how I taught myself to code html by hand using BBEdit. No WYSIWYG editors for this guy.

The years between then and now are a blur, but from then on, I was forever a traveler of the “internet super-highway” as I once put it to my wife. She thought I was a dork when I said it, but she gets it now.

At my next employer, I moved from design into database and web development where I learned to code Java, Javascript, and PHP while honing my html and css skills. By a stroke of luck, I landed in the Salesforce ecosystem nearly 15 years ago and have remained there ever since.

Somewhere in those years, I developed a Mac utility app named Yasu, which was short for “Yet another system utility.” I’ll have to write a story about that time one day. Being an indie Mac developer were some of the best years of my life.

My journey has been a series of right place, right time moments. I wouldn’t change any of them to be where I am today. I sometimes think back to that time I was so afraid to touch a keyboard at the water company. I can’t imagine a life without technology now. It’s allowed me some of my most creatively explosive growth and connections with people that mean a lot to me.

I’ve been blessed by my time on the internet to say the least.

A Bicycle and Barbed Wire

Monday, July 22, 2024

Here’s another one of those childhood memories that left a scar; literally. This one is about the time I tried to stop my out of control bicycle using a barbed wire fence.

It was probably as painful as it sounds. Honestly, I can’t remember if it was.

Around the time I was stealing cigarettes from my mother, I was also learning how to ride a bicycle. Wicked step-father and mom didn’t want to teach me. I was simply handed a bike and left to figure it out on my own.

Self-reliance ended up being a theme throughout my childhood, and is a big reason for my reluctance to rely on others to this day. Mom thought she was doing me a favor, but I’m not too sure about that decision…

Anyway, the bike mom and wicked step-father brought home for me was a blue and white Schwinn girl’s model. I recall that it looked fairly new, so they must’ve spent some amount of money on it – but dammit, it was a girl’s bike. Thank god we lived on a farm with no other kids around. I would have been the laughing stock of my peers otherwise.

To teach myself how to ride, I would run along beside the bike, and once I was running fast enough, I would let the bike go so it would “ride” along by itself. I have no idea why my seven year-old boy brain thought this was the way to learn, but it just seemed right at the time.

This went on for a while with me losing and gaining interest in the bike. Eventually, I somehow learned how to balance and pedal. I can’t remember how, but it happened because I’m able to ride a bike today. I have a vague recollection that maybe one of wicked step-father’s adult sons had pity on me and took it on himself to teach me.

Not long after figuring out how to pedal without falling, I got daring and chose to ride down the quarter-mile long dirt driveway. On the left side was a barbed wire fence, on the right side was a big open wheat field.

Since I hadn’t mastered the art of using friction brakes, which way do you think I ended up steering when I lost control? You guessed it. I steered towards the barbed wire fence.

As I got close to it, I instinctively reached out for the fence to slow myself down. I quickly learned that one does not simply stop when grabbing barbed wire. Nope. One continues on for a bit as the rusty barbs tear into the palm of your hand before you wind up stopping.

I can’t recall the pain, but I do remember the blood. Lots of blood. Did I end up getting stitches? No. Should I have? Probably.

After ditching the bike on the side of the driveway, I ran back to the house screaming hysterically, clutching my left wrist while the blood ran down my forearm. My hand looked like hamburger and I was freaked out.

When I got to my mother, she inspected it, washed the cut, put Neosporin on it and wrapped it with a couple Kleenex and the funky pink paper tape she wore at night to keep the curls at her temples in place while she slept. I wouldn’t call it a good field dressing by any means. There was no tetanus shot, and there definitely wasn’t a doctor visit.

I don’t remember anything about the incident after that or how my hand went on to heal, but it did. I think I’ve blocked all of it out. I did go on to ride the blue Schwinn girl’s bike without hitting any more fences.

It’s been more than 50 years since this happened and I can still make out the very faint long scar in the palm of my left hand. I always go back to this memory when I see any barbed wire fence. It’s left both a physical and mental scar that has lasted a lifetime.

Pour One Out for Henry

Friday, June 28, 2024

I’m saddened to learn of the passing of Henry Carvajal yesterday after battling cancer for a year and a half.

I can’t say he and I were close friends, but when I was active in the Long Beach Blues scene, I was privileged to have shared the stage with him more than a dozen times.

Henry had chops and a great voice. He had style too. And to top it off, he was one of the more gracious musicians I’ve known.

The photo above is the last time I got to play with him on New Year’s Eve, 2017. Henry’s on guitar, I’m on bass.

My wife and I went to support the band I used to play with and the evening turned into a jam session, as they always seemed to. Though I may not be part of that scene anymore, we have good memories of that night.

🥃 This one’s for you Henry. Thanks for being an awesome human. Rest in peace. We’ll catch you at the big jam in the sky one day…

YouTube Video