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Watch for falling cats

Hey, look what I found in a forgotten corner of my hard drive (I clean my hard drive to relax; I’ve had a molten asshole of a day).

This was the very first placeholder graphic on my very first corner of the Web — that free meg of space ISP’s gave you. I figured out early on I could cram in much more art per byte by sticking with monochrome. Small file sizes were, of course, seriously important then.

“Then” would’ve been, maybe, 1994? I think that’s the year I first saw the Web. I had read Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web concept paper via Usenet in 1990 and thought it was the dumbest thing I had ever seen. People creating content for free, and letting other people link to it? Pff! Stupid hippies!

But then, a few years later, a friend showed me the Web in action, and then I thought it was the dumbest thing I had ever seen. Seriously, the early Web was lame-o, lame-o. Until there was a certain critical mass of content, it wasn’t good for much at all. It wasn’t even that fun. And it was ugly.

Except for Find the Spam (lovingly reproduced with historic exactitude here). I thought Find the Spam was the most hysterical thing I’d ever seen in my life ever. Like, ever. Odd, though…when I laughed, dilithium crystals shot out of my nose.

Anyhow, I wish I could remember where this drawing is. I think it’s much better than it looks in this grievously squoze-down version. The odd part is…how did I get it in the computer? Monitors of the era were capable of much better graphics than you usually saw on them, because there was no way to get pictures in. It was way before digital still cameras (we had a video camera that could frame-grab; the whole setup cost around a hundred grand). I think it was before those horrible little hand scanners (remember those?). Maybe we had desktop scanners at work by then.

Cat blogging. I been doing it a long, long time.

Comments


Comment from Enas Yorl
Time: March 22, 2007, 5:43 pm

Nice kitty! So did you finish your super-important project on time, or did you get to hear the “wooshing” sound of the deadline flying by?


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: March 22, 2007, 6:28 pm

Oh, this is a time-release asshole, this one. It won’t come to fruition for days, at least. See, I don’t do this particular kind of multimedia thing very often. But the request was pretty simple, so I thought I had a handle on it. Then they casually mentioned they’d like to run it vertically, when means designing the dingus on its side and physically rotating the monitor. Uh, okay. Only, I soon found out .avi video won’t run rotated 90° in the multimedia application I’m using.

I’m in a competence sandwich. The people calling the shots are too ignorant to know that their simple request is a huge request; my more competent cow orkers are too experienced and too busy to describe the solution in newbie terms for me.

Nothing left for it but sepuku.


Comment from Steamboat McGoo
Time: March 22, 2007, 11:36 pm

Don’t be too hard on your more competent cow orkers. Cow orking is a demanding activity, requiring significant physical effort and no small amount of stamina – as you’ve no-doubt observed.

As for your sandwich situation – look on the bright side. You can always just tell them, “Eat me.”

The kitty pictures are very good. I shamelessly copied them.


Comment from Pilar
Time: February 23, 2015, 3:36 am

Posted on Aw, this was an extremely nice post. Finding the time and aauctl effortto make a very good article… but what can I say… I procrastinate a whole lot and never seem to get nearly anything done.

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