Some Things From The Vault
One of the reasons I switched to WordPress was for its ability to easily create static, non-blog pages within the context of a blog-like site. My one unending project has been to collect as much of my published work in one place as as I can, if nothing else so that I have a place where I can find each story. After publishing for the better part of two decades, the job of finding and organizing everything, then building a Web page to house it all, is rather large.
This weekend I built two pages comprised of old stuff. The first will be interesting really only to those who care about the long slow demise of the newspaper industry and its various early flirtations with the Web. During 1997 and 1998, my first job out of grad school was at New Century Networks, a joint venture of nine newspaper companies to combine forces and content on the Web. The company briefly produced a site called NewsWorks that is barely remembered except for its unspectacular shuttering in the cold March of 98. On my last day in the office I salvaged the files of a few packages I had worked on to a Zip disk and have since preserved them in their original format. You can see the results, along with my own reflections on the experience here.
The second page I produced is basically a republishing of my old 1990 Bungee Jumping story written in my last term as a community college student. The realization that I wrote it 18 years ago gave me a bit of a shiver.
I did go on to Bungee jump a few more times. There was one more trip to Blue River Dam in the fall of 1991, and another to a privately owned bridge in 1992, where myself and a friend had organized a film crew to shoot some footage of the group of University of Oregon students we took with us. One of my great regrets in life is that I lost my copy of that tape. If you were on that trip and have a copy, please contact me, because I am desperate to transfer it to DVD and from there to the Web. I jumped one more time in Las Vegas in 2002. It wasn’t quite as fun as jumping in the great outdoors. I had a tape made of that jump but lost it as well.
