The Webweaver Begins — 1996
In 1996, building a website meant learning as you went — and occasionally wondering whether anyone would ever find it.
Thirty years of technology, projects, people and the occasional wrong turn.
Technology changes quickly. The stories around it tend to stick around.
Over the years there have been websites and servers, startups and data centers, boats and broken hardware, good ideas, questionable ideas, and more than a few things that worked only after they probably should have been abandoned.
In 1996, building a website meant learning as you went — and occasionally wondering whether anyone would ever find it.
Years spent managing enterprise VMware infrastructure eventually resulted in some very capable retired hardware following me home.
A simple privacy question became Docker, Ollama, Open WebUI, vision, image generation — and considerably more tinkering than expected.
Sometimes an ordinary object carries an extraordinary amount of family history — and becomes a reminder of how easily stories can disappear.
A 1978 Glastron GT-150, a Mercury 115 “Tower of Power,” and the questionable decision to take an old boat completely apart.
Mahogany, 420 horsepower, and about as practical as you'd expect a classic wooden boat to be. Practicality wasn't really the point.
Long before firewalls became appliances you bought and plugged in, Smoothwall could turn an ordinary PC into one.
Hand-written HTML and FTP in 1996; Google Sites and AI thirty years later. The tools changed rather dramatically.