1998
1998 was the Golden Age of mouser.org. I bought myself the domain name as a college graduation gift. My webcam was given to me, also ostensibly as a graduation gift. I did my second summer in a row at Imaginet, allegedly working on webpage back ends. However, since the company sucked so badly and they were hemmorhaging employees left and right, I found myself as one of the senior perl programmers and had the privledge of delegation. For the most part I delegated ever piddely job that came my way and spent the rest of my summer playing vintage vids and pinball in the gameroom and working on my website.Two of the most popular projects ever to grace mouser.org were developed during this time. The first was Megaball. The rubberband ball was a big hit at the office and I was encouraged to upgrade its rather lackluster website. I did this early in the year, and then it happened again over the summer. The second overhaul was actually done by Ben Benjamin of Superbad in return for the favor of lending him some bandwidth during some problems with his ISP. The Ben design is featured here:
The other major mouser.org component developed during 1998 was the Mousercam. The cam has been up and down over the years, in various locales ranging from my bedroom to my office, Massachusetts to New Mexico. If it is up now, it can be seen at the link below. Note that because this project is more-or-less ongoing, the link for the Mousercam is not under projects/oldweb.
One of the guys I worked with at Imaginet was Rolf Hanson. He was a hoopy frood and his eccentricity was refreshing. He was visible over my shoulder on the Mousercam and people were always asking me who that guy was in the background, so we wrote "ROLF" in big letters on the white board and a large arrow pointing to his head. One day, Jason added to the whiteboard making it say "Rolf shucks the jive." We started changing the caption every morning and taking screencaps of the cam for each one. I built an online submission engine so that mousercam viewers could suggest new additions for the whiteboard. Though Rolf, the whiteboard, and the job are all gone [no, Rolf isn't dead, he's just not in my office anymore], I left the submission engine up and people still submit ideas to it to this day. For some reason..
One of the more humorous elements of working for Imaginet was Dan Mallen, our marketing tard. The guy was so full of buzzwords and lingo that it was really easy to lose track of what he was actually talking about. Even when he wasn't pitching the company to some client, he talked in marketing. It made me think he was often not fully aware of what he was talking about, either. One day when he was really unleashing a storm of new media jargon sludge I sat down near him and just started writing it all down. I then went back to my office and created the Jargon Generator, which takes some basic generic sentence structures and inserts words from Dan Mallen's deluge de le crappe. He seriously used all of the stuff you'll see here in the space of 10 minutes.
Also that summer, I learned javascript. And I learned how poorly implemented and insecure it could be. And I learned how to crash the shit out of most browsers using it. And I made some demos of that in a projected called The Bomb. Note that while these were very effective when they were made, most modern browsers are too smart for this crap.
Here's a little thing I made in the weeks before graduation. It's just sort of a silly art project.
When I moved to Boston to attend grad school at MIT in the fall of 1998, I went to a web conference in town called WebBoston. A bunch of bigwig web celebrities were there. I got invited to a party at the Pour House where I took lots of pictures. Here they are:
Right at the end of the summer I went to Portugal to attend a conference in Coimbra. It was an amazing conference and I met some great people. I put some random pictures taken on the trip up on my website to share with other conference participants. Originally there was no interface to these. I have since incorporated them into my online photogallery.
We got Evan Smith really drunk one night and sat him down in front of my computer with a microphone. He's famous around campus for doing impressions. Not appropraite for children. Enjoy.
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