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This site is now twenty years old.

What were you doing twenty years ago?

I was living in Seattle. Working on the west shore of Lake Union. Working on two different books, but years from finishing either. I’d done a paper zine that had petered out after a half-dozen issues, and had a personal web site I’d been running for three or four years, but it was mostly just links and had no real content.

That was one of my gripes in the early days of the web: there were very few sites with actual content. Most personal web sites were just a list of links elsewhere, and maybe a person’s resume. There were a few sites focused on content, but there were no real go-to places for people generating their own content. This was obviously long before Facebook or Twitter, but it was also before Blogger or LiveJournal. It was years before the concept of blogs was even born.

In that mid/late-90s time, there were online diaries. People would hack together their own diaries online, on services like GeoCities or Angelfire, and write daily about their life. It was very much the wild west, and you had to do the heavy lifting yourself, getting an index to work, links and other things. This was before CSS was practical, before PHP was really used (PHP 2.0 wouldn’t ship for another six months) and when tables and frames had just become standardized enough to use regularly across all browsers. But, some people did it. Just to give you an idea of volume: Open Pages ran a web ring for diarists, and was by far the most popular. In 1998, they had 537 members. In 1997, there were just over a million web pages on the entire web, with about 120 million users. Now, there are about 1.2 billion web pages, and 3.2 billion users. The web was a much smaller place then.

I kept a paper diary every day, and had for a few years. I didn’t want to put this online, but I did want to have a place to talk about whatever. I did this a bit with my zine, but it took some work to put out each issue. I figured I could do something where I could write every day, and immediately put it live. I ate lunch in my office by myself every day, and I wanted something to do besides work on these books which would not see the light of day for years.

At the time, I had a site running from my account at the Speakeasy internet cafe, which was at speakeasy.org/~jkonrath. With the help of my friend Bill Perry, I wrote a little scrap of emacs code so I could fire up the emacs editor, hit Control-X Control-J, and be dumped into a new file with today’s date plus .html as the filename. I could then write in it, save it, and it would be live on the web site. I then wrote a little C program that would crawl through the files and create an HTML index, which I put in a left-side frame. (Yes, frames. Does anyone even remember that evil shit?)

I wrote for a few years, with a few breaks here and there, and the idea was just a simple diary, of day-to-day stuff. There was no central theme, and maybe this was lack of ambition, or that I already had these books as my main project, and all I was doing was documenting my thought process. Some people started larger projects, like writing a series of essays and stories so their diary was more of a lit journal, or keeping on a theme and creating something that was more akin to a TV show or a “real” web site, like actual journalism. I didn’t want to do that.

This reminded me of the zine world, and how it got huge and then fell apart in the Nineties. A lot of people made zines because it was all they could do in their pre-internet small town: go to the photocopy shop and xerox a bunch of stuff to mail to people. But some people wanted to compete with the larger publications, and tried to make their zines look more like the glossy mags. So they spent thousands of dollars on offset printing, and getting office space, and getting distribution into book stores, and it went from becoming a zine to becoming a business. It killed the spirit of DIY zines.

This is what happened when the word “blog” was invented, and some heat was applied to the market. People went from this DIY ethic to doing it for the money. Blog-to-book deals happened. People started political blogs to compete with (or be ahead of) sites like CNN. Movie rights were sold. People became celebrities. Ads were everywhere. Blogs became A Thing.

And, I kept puttering away. I moved to New York. I started publishing books. And my entries became longer and more focused, but they were still about memories and nostalgia and gripes and travel and whatever else.

LiveJournal was invented. And Blogger, and Blogspot, and WordPress, and Friendster, and MySpace, and Facebook, and Twitter. A flood of new content happened, but the bar was greatly lowered. It went from long essay writing to short update writing to very short link sharing to 140 characters to nothing but a picture or an emoji. Writing writing vanished.

I kept plugging away, although my other projects took up more and more of my time. I should look up the exact metrics – there are just over 1200 published posts now, which over 20 years, is something like once every six days. But, it’s going a bit slower now – I think we’re going on 100 days in 2017, and I’ve only got 17 entries so far. A lot of that has to do with the fact that I never know what to write here anymore. I feel like writing about the day-to-day seems dumb, and people don’t want to hear about it. There’s some heavy self-censorship going on there, because of the general change in what we do online, and that feeling of futility that nobody is reading this anyway. But, I’ve kept going.

The rumored.com web domain started late in 1998. This was moved to Pair.com around then. I slowly made improvements to my duct tape infrastructure, but in 2009, gave up and moved everything to WordPress. Originally, the site was just called my journal, no real name. Then it got the name Tell Me a Story About the Devil. Then, around the beginning of 2011, I started calling it The Wrath of Kon. And here we are.

As I mentioned, there’s about 1200 entries, for a word count of just over a million, something like War and Peace plus Infinite Jest.

So, twenty years. There’s no reason for me to stop at this point, so let’s see what happens in the future.

BTW: if you want to read my favorite entries from over the years, go here: http://rumored.com/tag/favorites/

 

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general

Death of an office

I found out about this a bit ago, but my old Samsung office was bulldozed and replaced recently, which is strangely nostalgic. I took an electronics class last year with a guy who worked at the architecture firm that did the new building, and heard all about the grand scrape and replacement.

I started working there in the fall of 2008, when Silicon Valley was very different. It was only a few years ago, but it was after the crash, and nobody was hiring. Traffic has nearly doubled in the last five years, and this was before that boom started. I was living in LA when I got hired at Samsung — I’d been spamming out resumes for months, and it was one of the few pings I hit. Tech writers are usually last in/first out, so it wasn’t easy landing something then. But I did, and I moved to South San Francisco, and started the 101 commute every day to San Jose.

Prior to moving here, I had specific mental images of Silicon Valley, mostly formed by living far away from it, romanticizing the idea of working in the heart of the technology world. Twenty years before, I idolized these Bay Area companies like Apple and Sun and NeXT and Silicon Graphics, and thought about what it would have been like to work in one of those office parks in Palo Alto or Mountain View. And I’d been in the Bay Area twice for work related things, once in 1996, and again in 2006. Both times, I remember driving on the 101 and seeing the big headquarters of these tech giants and wondering what it must be like in those buildings, hacking code or plugging wires into servers in an air-conditioned machine room.

When you spend time in San Jose, you see the obvious new construction, the giant glass and steel buildings that have popped up everywhere. It seems like half of them belong to Cisco, and the other half belong to companies you’ve never even heard of. Because a company like Fujitsu might make the hard drive, but a dozen other companies made the little pieces or sensors or wrote the patents for the storage technology. I eventually learned a little more about these companies, either because I had coworkers who came from them, or because everyone had this ubiquitous cartoon map of Silicon Valley with icons of every big tech firm on it.

What fascinated me more was the layer under that layer, the old San Jose, the scraps and remains of the city from the Seventies and earlier. You’d occasionally see little bits of it peeking through: a Chinese restaurant that never remodeled; an apartment building that never got gentrified into condos; a back side of a building that never got repainted. I had a strange nostalgia for this era I never saw, like when Atari was still king and still had factories in Sunnyvale cranking out 2600 consoles. Or there used to be plenty of computer stores, back when people wire-wrapped and hand-built their 8-bit machines from bare chips and boards. I’d see vestigial pieces of that, like when I’d go to Fry’s Electronics and see more than just shrink-wrapped Dell Laptops for sale.

So Samsung, or at least the division I worked for, was in this series of brick buildings on First and Tasman that looked like every generic two-story medical office building built in 1974 you’d find in a Chicagoland suburb. There were three near-identical buildings: a big one with a lunch room, conference areas, and a reception hall full of display cases of new technology Samsung invented or whatever. Then there were two other buildings, totally identical, of just offices. I worked in one of those.

My building was shot. It looked like this old Seventies Silicon Valley, with wood trim and bright red brick and a vibe that screamed 1978. And I don’t think anything had been updated since then. No two acoustic ceiling tiles were the same shade of yellow, and the desks looked like they had been hauled out of a storage facility from the Mad Men era. I later found that management of the various Samsung labs took great pride in how little they spent per employee, each one trying to get as low of a per-seat investment as possible to maximize profits.

I basically lived in that office for the year and a half I worked there. I’d go in early to beat the traffic, and often end up stuck at my desk until well after dinner, or later. I was close to the dozen or so people on my team, because we went to war together. We ate every meal together, went to endless meetings, worked on our projects for hundreds and thousands of hours, and spent forever in that dreary, fluorescent-lit cube farm.

And then I left. I got another job, which I wrote about here a long time ago. Then I started working from home, and never spent any time on the peninsula or in the South Bay anymore. And I didn’t think much about that place until I’d heard about it being demolished.

The new building is very typical — I feel like Samsung saw the new Apple spaceship campus going up, and said “Oh yeah? Well, check this shit out…” and threw together their own monstrosity of a headquarters. It’s supposed to be a hip new open-concept thing, and it looks like an East German propaganda headquarters. The building takes up every square inch of the footprint of the old place. I always think of SV campuses as having a laid-back look with landscaping and thick green lawns and big parking lots and trees, then the building, a hundred or two feet from the road. But this is like inches from the sidewalk. And the last thing you’d want there is an open plan, because everyone spends all day screaming in Korean on their speaker phones.

And it’s weird, but some of the strongest memories I have of that place are pacing around that parking lot on my cell phone. I could never take calls at my desk, so any time anything important happened, I went downstairs and walked around the lot with my phone in hand. Like I remember talking to my dad when my uncle Mike died, and I have vivid memories of that conversation, walking back and forth among the sea of identical Hyundai cars. I also remember sneaking out to have phone interviews with other companies when I was planning my escape. The parking lot is now gone, but every other building on the street has the old layout, which makes the new building look even more strange.

I was also talking to a coworker about the fate of our team. We worked on a developer program for a phone OS that does not exist anymore. The site is gone, the team is gone, and every trace of every thing we shipped has vanished from the web. I don’t think anything of consequence was ever developed from our SDK. The entire division is technically gone, since Samsung Telecommunications America merged into Samsung Electronics America. Ultimately, this happens with everything in life. But it happened so fast here, and that’s par for the course.

Above all, I’m mad I didn’t find out about the demolition. I would have loved to take a few swings at that place with a sledge hammer. Oh well.