Welcome to you who have come to snarkout.com
Just before the turn of the century, I was about to start college, and had just signed on to continue my summer job on a part-time basis as a contractor, answering tech support emails for an hour or two each day while I went to school.
To be able to work from home I bought my first PC, a Dell Dimension, and I signed up for the finest residential broadband that Pacific Bell had to offer. I was the first person in our neighborhood with broadband; I know this because they had to make repeated service calls to upgrade a mile worth of copper phone wires until they’d support a DSL connection, but after a month of that, the lights on the modem finally stayed green, and I officially entered the Internet Age, with such bounteous bandwidth that I was able to stream foreign films from CinemaNow in glorious 480p.
Back before MySpace, if you wanted an Internet presence, you needed your own website, and if you wanted to look like you knew what you were doing, you needed a domain name. I decided to register a domain name and figure out how to set up a website, and the first name I came up with that was available was snarkout.com. In those early days of the Internet I was fond of picking handles that were inspired by the works of my favorite childhood author, and The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death is one that has always held a special resonance for me.
I opened up a couple of ports in my firewall, installed a freeware web server that could run as a Windows service (I think it was called Xitami), made a website by writing some raw HTML in Notepad, pointed my new domain name at my home IP (which in those days I knew as well as my phone number), and the PC running in my childhood bedroom became part of the World Wide Web. This is what “the cloud” was in those days, understand? It was, occasionally, a background process running on the same cheap PC that some college kid was playing Counter-Strike on. I didn’t host any images because I didn’t want to suddenly have a ping spike in the middle of a match because someone had picked that moment to visit my stupid website.
When I moved out of my mom’s house and into a place with a LAN and a T1 line that someone else took care of, I no longer had an easy way to route outside traffic to my own PC, so I ended my self-hosted website experiment, and didn’t renew the domain name. By the time I found another web host (a friend with more knowhow and means who had space at a colo), snarkout.com had been snatched up by a squatter who wanted hundreds of dollars for it, so I let them have it and started over with a new domain name. In the years since, I’ve periodically regretted letting that registration lapse way back when, but never enough to pay a ransom to get it back.
A few weeks ago, I thought about it again, and I when went to check on snarkout.com to see who owned the current placeholder page I found it… unregistered. They’d given up. I grabbed it.
It felt fitting that the domain name I had back in the self-hosted Wild West days should fall back into my hands right as I’ve been yearning for a return of the “tiny internet” where people make their own websites instead of building their online homes in the eaves of large social media sites that are liable to go under or get acquired or change their terms of service at any moment.
There are a few other things I’ve been thinking about in recent years. One is that in the age of the microblog, I don’t take the time to sit down and write out a complete string of thoughts nearly as often as I used to, and I can feel the muscles atrophying. Another is that as I get older, I sometimes think back on earlier episodes of my own life and get really bugged when I can’t remember a specific detail, and it makes me think that maybe I should write stuff down while I can still barely remember it.
This macroblog will therefore likely feature a lot of rambling stories that don’t go anywhere, written mostly for myself and my descendants (hi, descendants!). Maybe after I’ve warmed up with enough self-indulgence I’ll dabble in other classic blog genres like “rants” or “reviews”. The promise I make to you (and myself) is that if I ever feel the urge to write about my day job (software engineering), it’s not gonna be here. This first post is about as technical as it’s ever going to get, and from here on I hope to be mostly writing about offline things.
Welcome to snarkout.com!