Category: history

(Not) too old for this *

By the end of this year it will be 30 years since I registered my first domain name (warning, your browser might throw a hissy fit, I didn’t bother to get a certificate to secure that site, it’s just there for nostalgic reasons, not worth the hassle).

Yesterday I was trying to get a colleague to deploy a simple service that would allow us to save a file on a server and download the file from the server. Apparently it’s much harder in today’s sophisticated cloud environments than it used to be.

Speaking of clouds, I did some house cleaning on various accounts, domains, mailboxes, cloud services today. I got lost multiple times in the complexities of these services (in particular I feel a new and warm form of hate for google cloud). When corporate meets software this is what we get.

I’m not really complaining, every day I’m talking with a chatbot who understands me better than most souls. It’s magic.

Yet there are moments when I miss a world when early technologies were simpler to master. There was some stuff I knew almost everything about.

But at the same time I find amazing coming to work every morning and inventing new things. For the complicated stuff now I just ask ChatGPT ;)

One year and counting

Yesterday it was exactly one year since my first quarantine post.

The day before we had decided to close the office, at least for a week, and then see what would happen. One year later I have gone back to the office not more than 5 times, and never spent any time there doing any regular “day at the office” kind of work.

But what a year, uh?!?

While quite a few of my friends in the UK are getting vaccinated, as of today here in Italy we are back in full “red zone” lockdown. Oh, and my flight back to London has been cancelled, so now I should fly back to London on May 1st.

London… I think I have been less times in central London in the last year than in the previous dozen years. It’s odd.

But I have definitely spent more time at home in Italy than in the last six years (since I moved to London). It has been good.

Photo of our house taken earlier today, we need to replace the deck and I was documenting the status quo.

Red zone means that you cannot leave your municipality, unless you have real needs, and in that case you must print a permit in case you get stopped by police.

These limitations to movement between municipalities got me thinking about borders. A while back I came across this post from 2007 I wrote on the day Slovenia entered the Schengen treaty, and how incredible it felt when that border disappeared. We were just not used to borders anymore. Now I’m mindful of the borders of my tiny municipality, aware that if I want to leave it I need to carry some sort of pass (let alone travelling to another country, which is a much more complicated and in some cases completely forbidden matter).

Of course this will all go away soon enough, but I think that I will be even more mindful crossing borders (especially when I will have to cross the border to the UK for the first time after Brexit).

Keep calm, get vaccinated and carry on.

Down memory lane

This week I renewed for another couple of years my first internet domain: studioidea.it. I haven’t been using it for years, but it’s a piece of my past I just cannot let go. Who knows, maybe I will use it again some day.

I registered the domain in November of 1995. Official records say that it was registered in January 96, but I’m pretty sure it was 95. Probably they had not established modern protocols for domain registrations, or perhaps they had not invented calendars yet, I don’t remember.

Anyway, a little calculation revealed that sometime in the last year I passed the threshold of having spent more than half of my life connected to the Internet. Which sounds like a lot, but it also means that I have very clear memories of life before being online. Many people I work with just don’t have that notion, if not from the adventurous stories of us old farts. Many people I work with are younger of my domain name. Can you imagine?

Speaking of memories, I read that Fry’s Electronics shut down their stores this week. I remember going to Fry’s with my dad for the first time in the early 90s. At the time we would visit San Francisco every January for the yearly pilgrimage to Mac World. Discovering a shop which sold under the same roof computers, consumer electronics, junk food, books, electronic components and every other product a nerd my fancy buying made me think for the first time that there were other people like me on this planet (but maybe not in my neighborhood).

I visited Fry’s shops countless other times. I have fond memories of taking there several friends over the years (mostly to the Western themed one in Palo Alto). Last time I went after a long hiatus was in 2018, and it already felt like something from the past. In the post Amazon world a place like that didn’t made much sense anymore.

In other news, it’s the warmest end of February on record in Italy, and I have booked my flight back to London for the 6th of April. I booked before realising that Easter is on the 4th, so now I will have to figure out how to get a Covid test (with an English certificate) on Easter weekend. It’s going to be an interesting challenge.

That’s all folks, enjoy the early spring if you can, stay safe, be kind.

Color of the year

The color of the year for 2014 is Pantone® 18-3224 Radiant Orchid. Now you know.

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When I started working in graphic design, having a Pantone color book was one of my main goals. They were rare and expensive, back when Macs screens were still black and white and it was the only way to manage colors. And they were cool little objects, I think I still have mine somewhere.

Back then most colors fit in 3 digits numbers (I still remember how one of the first logos I designed used blue 300 and grey 428). At some point 4 digits colors started appearing, and they were kinda exotic. Amazing how we got all the way to “18-3224”. Looks like there’s still a lot of colors to invent.

Anyway, it’s good to see how Pantone has been able to modernize and be still around after all these years. These days I think that the Pantone product I use more is my coffee mug :).

Little boxes indeed

Euan writes:

I have been writing text in little boxes on the interwebs for twenty years. Used to be called usenet, then bulletin boards, then blogs, now social. Still little boxes.

The tools we use to write have been pretty much the same for a very long time. Sometime in early 1984 my dad came home with the first Mac 128. It came with two floppy disks, each with the whole operating system and an application on it: one for MacPaint, one for MacWrite.

MacPaint was my favorite, but I remember MacWrite well, here’s what it looked like:

Now, what I find odd is that some 28 years later I’m still writing in a box which pretty much offers the very same features (actually I have lost tabulation).

Why haven’t writing tools evolved? Why are not relevant content from the interwebs popping up while I write this, helping me finding more information in real-time? Why isn’t this post appearing in real time on Euan’s screen, while I’m writing it, allowing us to develop a conversation? Why aren’t previous rants I wrote about how technology has not evolved enough for me automatically linked to this post?

There are ways to do all this, but they are far from being mainstream.

PS: true, there are outlines.