It was the Summer of 1995 and I was part-time in grad school when I first encountered the Internet. Dialing into the university’s server with my 28.8k connection, I used a book (remember those?) to find telnet sites, multiple user domains, and chat rooms. Part of the adventure (and frustration) was finding which sites were dead and which ones weren’t. All of it, every single bit of it, was command line.
One day, hanging out in the computer lab, I sat down in front of one of the newer computers that had an icon labeled ‘Netscape’. Being a bit adventurous, I clicked it.
Since then, the world has become a much, much smaller place.
Ever since elementary school, I have craved information. I could never get my fill of everything from thing that nearly everyone knows like state capitals to what year the oldest tower at the Kremlin was constructed (1491, is the answer, one I’ve been lugging around since 6th grade). My favorite Christmas present? A World Almanac, every Christmas. I am the Trivia King.
It was addictive. It’s still addictive – a World Wide Web filed with information that serves up a link where you can go for more information and another link for more information and on and on and on. It was made for someone like me.
With that in mind, I must sheepishly admit that my site doesn’t ‘web’ to anywhere. Seems kind of pointless, doesn’t it? Let me fix that…
hackaday.com – My ‘day job’ is working as technician. I’m a bit of a jack of all trades, but, as the saying goes, master of none. Hackaday is a site I visit every day for knowledge and inspiration. There’s a little bit of everything ‘maker’ on this site. More than one of my projects have benefitted from a visit here.
xkcd.com – Another favorite site, this one filled with nerd humor. Believe it or not, I’ve learned quite a bit from this site as well.
stackoverflow.com – You may find this difficult to fathom, but part of my job is dealing with information. It was just in past couple of years that I discovered that the best way to wrangle information is to build the tools for parsing it myself. Stackoverflow is my go-to source clues on to solve my Python problems.