Category: Personal

Through Being Cool

Salon.com Technology | On sale at Old Navy: Cool clothes for identical zombies!

Thanks to Elise for the link. My reaction to the article, though, is “Who cares?” I guess I’m well past being cool, and I’ve never been someone who worries about their fashion sense. What I like is that there’s a HUGE selection of CHEAP clothes for MEN, and that’s a rare combination. Well, I guess, not so rare, now. By the way, the first Old Navy store in Toronto will open in the spring of next year. And I’m baffled by the writer’s assumption that “conformity” is a terrible evil to be avoided. Certainly conformity of thought is not healthy, but where I buy my clothes and furniture? Come on. Most people I know who shop at Old Navy and/or IKEA do it because, in reality, those external things don’t mean that much to them.

Letting Go Of Mommy’s Hand

Yesterday, Heather told a story about her childhood. It reminded me of a story from mine. As a toddler, I used to sleep in the same room as my parents, and I remember that I couldn’t fall asleep unless I was holding onto my mother’s hand. I would stretch my arm out between the bars of the crib, and reach for mom’s hand. As I got older, and slept in a bed in my own room, the habit remained, only I would reach up and hold the bedpost until I fell asleep. I rationalized it as I grew into a 6 or 7 year old, thinking that if any bad men tried to kidnap me while I slept, they wouldn’t be able to pry my hand from the bed, and therefore, I’d be safe. It was during a family trip to Ireland when I was just turning 9 that I decided to “put away childish things,” forsaking both the bedpost and my nightlight. It is the first memory I have of consciously deciding to “grow up.”

Speaking of trips to Ireland, last March when I was in Dublin visiting family, I discovered two neat things about my family history:

  • My great grandmother O’Keeffe owned a house in Howth, just north of Dublin, and this house was a gift to her from Michael Collins’ mother. She (my great grandmother) was quite involved in Ireland’s struggle for independence, at various times sheltering Michael Collins and Eamon DeValera in her house in London, when she lived there.
  • I am related to Irish writer Brendan Behan, through marriage.

It’s probably not that unusual. Ireland is a small country.

Close To The Centre

Lately, I’ve been feeling especially close to the centre of things. If that makes no sense, I’ll give an example. About a year ago, while working at a computer store, I talked to a fellow named Avi Lewis, who is a television music journalist here in Toronto. He was buying a computer for his wife, and was out of town, so phoned me. He paid, and said his wife Naomi would be coming to pick up her new computer in an hour or so. When she arrived, I realized she was Naomi Klein, a fairly well known journalist. I think it came out that she was writing a book. A few months ago, her book No Logo came out to very good reviews. I admit I haven’t read the book, but apparently Thom Yorke of Radiohead did, and stated it was a huge influence on the writing and recording of Kid A. So, although it’s absurd to think that I had any influence on Radiohead, in a small way, I was involved. Like six degrees of separation was somehow reduced to two degrees.

First Internet Experience

I got an alumni letter from one of my many old colleges the other day, asking me to update my information, and it had my very first email address on it. Well, not my very first, since my very first email address was at that very college, back in 1992-93, but my first commercial account. It brought back a lot of memories, and that time somehow seems a lot further in the past than it really is.

My first exposure to the Internet was an accident. I frequented a fair number of BBS’s in the late 1980s (and I even had a Compuserve membership for a few years, though I used it sparingly due to the expense), with my trusty 1200bps modem (or maybe I’d upgraded to the doubly fast 2400 by that time). I found an intriguing BBS in Toronto called zooid, which seemed to be a hangout for UNIX types. I knew (and know) nothing about UNIX, but one night stumbled across a command line interface that seemed open to a huge world of information, much larger than typical BBS fare. I started reading about university library collections thousands of miles away. I was giddy, but a bit nervous. Was I supposed to be here? Was this going to cost me money? Fair questions in those days, I think. I didn’t really understand how this worked, and obviously didn’t realize the significance of my discovery until much later. When I headed off to the above mentioned college, in the autumn of 1992, I was about to discover even more.

At this college, as I soon found out, there were rooms in each of the residence halls where groups of terminals glowed around the clock. They had access to something called “e-mail.” Using the pine (or was it elm) mail reader, I soon discovered I could keep in touch with all my friends back in Toronto, at least the two who also had academic email addresses. In an interesting note, my two friends were both graduate students; no undergraduates could use the system at that time. And at my college, everyone could have an email account, but you had to go to the Computer Centre and specifically ask for one, so it was still the domain of the UNIX geeks. Again, I was consumed with worry that this was going to cost money, like long distance charges for the telephone or something.

When I returned to Toronto in the summer of 1993, I knew something had changed. I needed an email account. The offerings were slim. I originally signed up with an outfit called “Info Nation,” which promised a “graphical interface” for the Internet, whatever that meant. But “Info Nation” went belly up within weeks, it seemed. Next, I discovered that a group called “Internex Online” was operating and you could sign up for an account and pay monthly, like your phone bill. At that time, you had to physically go down to their offices and sign up, so off I went. I remembered the place looked like a regular office in a downtown tower block, but it looked like they had just moved in, and the staff looked pretty freaky. It was a few months later I found out that Internex Online actually grew out of that same zooid BBS that I had accessed a few years before. Internex only lasted a few years before hitting some financial problems and being bought out. There’s a fascinating article from 1995 outlining their whole history. It sheds a lot of light on the early days of ISPs, with techies running businesses for the first time. Go and read it.

It seems amazing to me that my entire experience of the Internet spans only 10 years, and that for most people, it’s much shorter than that. I’ve always thought the history of computers was pretty compressed and dizzying, but it’s nothing compared to this. I wonder where we’ll be in another ten years?

(February 2007) BONUS: Here’s a great archived article from March 1994 from Toronto’s eye weekly, by veteran tech writer K.K. Campbell (who seems to have disappeared).