Tuesday, June 15, 2010

The Hukilau 2010

We had a great swingin' time at the retro-fab, tikirific Hukilau in Fort Lauderdale this weekend. See lots of pix, video and read all about it here at Tiki Lounge Talk: http://tikiloungetalk.com/2010/06/14/memories-from-hukilau-2010-fort-lauderdale/

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Remember When...

Remember when the Internet was just the Internet, and there was no World Wide Web?

I still remember dialing up on AOL, getting that "You've Got Mail" message, and then getting the big giant button that said "ENTER THE WEB" or something like that. Then you'd click on and say, now what?

I also still remember the first website I ever saw. It was www.dunkindonuts.com. It was a single page, with a small clip-art of a pink glazed donut in the upper left corner, and two paragraphs on how wonderful their donuts and coffee were. Of course you couldn't order bags of coffee beans or anything on the site, but it did say to visit you local Dunkin' Donuts store to purchase some.

That was 1996. It took several minutes to load the page, and then the connection went down.

Two years later I bought my first collectible on eBay. It was something I'd looked for, for around 20 years. Found it on eBay in 15 minutes, paid for it with a money order and had it in ten days.

Jump to 2000. I buy a book on html. I never get passed page four. I download an mp3 for the first time. It takes twenty minutes.

2004: my 350 Ghz Mac G4 Tower can't handle the web fast enough to keep up with websites that have photos, buttons, ways to buy things, and some fancy-assed animations called Flash. I buy a 1.8 Ghz G5 iMac, and use the G4 as a doorstop.

2006: All of a sudden I'm getting angry because it's taking almost an entire minute to download a four minute video while I'm shopping for car parts for my 1953 Chevy and watching cartoons made entirely in Flash.

2008: The economy goes sour, but I don't care...I rarely go out anymore because all the time I spent socializing at bars and parties is taken up by commenting on MySpace, Facebook, and Weblogs.

2009: I have a light week at work so I decide to start a blog and build two websites, without having any idea what I'm doing. Technology has caught up to me, and they are set up in three weeks.

2010: Between writing for my two personal blogs, my work blog, four twitter accounts, two Facebook fan pages (or I guess now 'Like' pages), work fan page, myspace page (for nostalgic purposes), eight email accounts, and commenting on other blogs I have less than 30 hours a week to eat, sleep and work. I'm broke, so I'm still using my 2005 iMac which sounds like a lawnmower and crashes everytime I click on anything that remotely resembles movement. I haven't seen my wife in weeks, although we IM each other from different rooms in the house often. Something furry just walked by; I think it may have been a cat but without a word-bubble attached that says "lolz" I can't be sure.

2020: Now that computer chips are implanted in our heads, it's easier to work online. But I'm still getting emails from South African dictators telling me they have two million dollars waiting for me if I send them my bank info, and I still haven't seen a dime.

-CP