Category Archives: history

cowsills, history, writer's challenge

Writer’s Wednesday

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Once more into the breach dear friends. (With apologies to Firesign Theater and the infamous “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers” album.)

It’s time once more for Mama Kat‘s Wednesday Writer’s Challenge (which shows up on Thursday). This week the prompts are:

1.) What was the first CD (or record or cassette) you ever purchased? Write about the way that particular album made you feel then. Write about how it makes you feel now. writersdigest.com

2.) You were recently laid off. Instead of moping around, you’ve viewed it as a chance to start fresh. Pick a new career and write about your first day on the job. writersdigest.com

3.) List your five most recent favorite things.

4.) I’m hungry. Share your very favorite recipe!!

I choose to write about #1.

The very first vinyl (yes vinyl) record I ever bought, excluding the selected Donald Duck records I had as a little kid, was The Cowsils‘ “Indian Lake” single. This record, aka “Indian Lake”/”Newspaper Blanket” (MGM 13944, 1968), made it up the charts to US #10. As a further hint, 1968 is near the end of my junior high school career.

That album, with the rather simple thrumming bass line and the plaintive lyrics greatly appealed to my younger self. In the midst of the pubescent angst and other agonies of my life the time, it served as an oasis on the edge of the harder rock that I would discover in a year or so. A few years later I was reminded of this song by Mungo Jerry’s “In the Summer Time” as bubble gum headed toward funkifacation.

I find that the music continues to speak to me even now. In spite of the fact that it is a forerunner of bubble gum pop, I like it. It gets crammed in there between the earlier Iron Butterfly “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” and the later Led Zeppelin “Stairway to Heaven” in my set of musical road markers of the journey that is my life. In fact, way back in October, I waxed rhapsodic about “Indian Lake” and some of the impact it had on me. Click here for the highlights.

Strange how an acid rock afficianado like me could like a bubble gum song like “Indian Lake”, but there you have it. Just no explanation for good taste. {*grin*}

challenge, history

I remember when …

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(This is a post for Mama Kat’s challenge .)

I remember when … I registered my first domain name. It was the pre-historic stone age of the internet. In fact, at the time there was no internet. A small group of universities had begun experimenting with a thing called DARPA net, but there was very little connectivity and nothing but DARPA related usage. Machines that communicated at all used a store and forward dial-up network based on the uucp protocol to exchange email. If you were lucky, fast links exceeded 110 baud up to 300 baud. The dinosaur phone companies still monopolized the earth. Some of us even took to wearing animal furs as a step up from the fig leaves then in vogue. {*grin*}

Seriously, there was no network, browsers were a distant gleam and the PC had not yet been been invented. I wanted to exchange email with some colleagues via the store and forward uucp network that was just starting out and thus needed a domain name to specify my address. So I ponied up the 20 cents for postage stamp and mailed an application to domain registry (no commercial registrars yet) and a few weeks later got a letter authorizing my use of the domain name in perpetuity. No fees and no renewal.  I convinced the IT department at my employer to let me use a modem to connect to their machine as my local store point and let them forward it late at night via their phone line. So I was emailing happily in the stone-age.

Several years later, networking cards became available and local networks started to become common (still no internet). At that time I contacted the predecessor to ARIN and asked for some network numbers (IP addresses in modern lingo). They assigned me a Class C block that I still use today. At the time, there was no hint of a future value for the numbers nor was there a fear of running out of numbers. Today the impending shortage of numbers is driving the move to IPv6 . Back then, if you requested a lowly class C, it was granted. (Class C – 2^8 addresses) If you wanted a bigger Class B (2^16 addresses), you had to supply a justification letter. If you wanted a full class A block (2^24 addresses), you actually had to have a proposed use. Today you have to justify, show utilization, and pay a rather large fee every year. Even so, the chances are good you could not get a Class A address today under any circumstance.

To bring this journey into the past to a conclusion, I sold that original domain name in the early 90’s when a couple of companies who share my last name got involved in a bidding war to acquire the domain. Once it reached a certain price, my response was simple – “Give me your best bid and the highest bidder gets it.” Needless to say, that was the best investment I ever made in my life. Somewhere on the order of 25,000% growth a year. It also made me real glad my last name wasn’t Smith. {*grin*}