Okay, I've finally moved this page to my cs account. I hope to update it at most once a year.
14 April 2002 29 June 2001
It's weird: now that I'm out of school, I have no good reason to have a web page. It costs money, and it's a hassle to update. I could try to convince myself that I needed to have it for email (now that my Harvard account is gone), or that our fantasy football league needed to be hosted somewhere, or that my graphics papers get enough hits that they warrant a continued web presence, or Monty Python, or whatever. But I could have probably found solutions for those problems if I really wanted to. So basically I've had to come to terms with the fact that the only reason I have this domain, and still maintain this page, is the egotistical belief that other people, somewhere out in there in the ether, find what I have to say interesting.
And that makes me uncomfortable, because it's not really true: I know I'm not particularly interesting. I've started to learn that people go to personal web sites because they're curious about the author, not about what he has to say. That is, people want to know about me, not about my ramblings (such as this one). And even that's only because personal websites offer that kind of tantalizing, intimate view of someone's life that normally takes a few months of friendship to acquire -- but can now be assumed vicariously and anonymously. This kind of curiosity is a legitimate motivator, sure, but it breeds this kind freak-show mentality: come to my page! I promise my life is interesting! and so on.
And the sad thing is I believe all this, but I still have a page. Gross.
11 November 2000 Also, I thought the graphics were too
gaudy. If you've been here before, then you'll recognize this: ... which is probably the
only thing worth saving. It took me about two weeks to design one summer using
Bryce. Here's the original high-res rendered image.
More remnants of version two: If you're truly old-school
-- OG Splag -- you'll remember these outlandish creations as well: Have I progressed? I don't
know. But at least I'm not where I started. Who knows what the next version
will bring? Perhaps it'll be all text ;).
Yep, it's been the requisite coupla months and now I'm feeling vaguely dissatisfied with this website, but I'm too lazy to do anything concrete about it. The one good thing I did since the last time I updated this page (June 29th of last year, apparently) is to ditch the custom domain name and live in the comforting anonymity of bantha.org. In that post I hinted at the web logger's desire for "anonymous popularity": you want people to read your site, but you don't really know if or when they do, or of course even who they are. I'm finding out that's it's really a two-way street; I kind of enjoy the supplying the "intimate view" mentioned below, as long as it's kept in the abstract. Hence, no domain name. I'm probably going to depersonalize this site more in the future when I get around to it. (If you've been a long-time reader, you'll notice that Splag has been getting increasingly anonymous [but there's a long way to go, still] ever since its inception, although I didn't realize the trend at the time.)
So now I have my own domain name. For $10 bucks a month, I get 500 megs of server space, some email accounts, scripting capability, and as much ego-stroking as a man could want.
Every year or so I get really sick of
my website. Usually it's just issues of design, but this year I couldn't take
the content, either. The writing was terrible, and terribly outdated. It just
wasn't worth the time to try to revise it. So I decided to can everything. I've
been thinking about doing this redesign for quite some time now -- several weeks,
at least. It was quite a fierce battle between my innate and impressive laziness
and my increasing annoyance at all the stupid stuff on this site. I'm glad my
laziness lost this one. I decided to opt for a much simpler approach: no complicated
navigation bars, no overdone graphics, and only as much content as I figured
I could keep reasonably up to date, as opposed to the tens of pages that were
floating around anachronistically in version two.
