Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").

links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   watch it grow
Thursday, July 6 2000
When I was a kid (and even not so long ago), a common summertime activity was the building of dams in Folly Mills Creek, a strong little brook which runs through my parent's property. The goal, the thing that really contributed to my excitement and obsession with this particular activity, was for the water to rise to unprecedented heights. As the water was rising behind my dam, I'd run around the perimeter of the reservoir watching virgin lands being inundated and abandoned by resident insects, my bare feet splashing through the shallows with giddy self-satisfaction at my achievement. But as soon as the water stopped rising, I'd feel my emotions crashing and I'd be forced to renew my additions to the dam.
Watching the traffic flow through my CollegeClub.com demise page reminds me of those dams. I'm seeing flows of traffic such as I've never seen, and I'm excited. I want to keep that traffic rising and the visitors happy. I was very pleased yesterday when I observed that page actually "going viral" (as Adam Jacobs would put it). This was evidenced by the stats, which showed about half the traffic coming from web-based email, particularly CollegeClub's own email system. People are watching the page, finding it hilarious, and mailing the link to all of their friends. In effect, my site is feeding off the community structures of the very site whose demise it's predicting. And there isn't much that the few weary hands at the keel of CollegeClub can do about it either.
There's also lots of traffic coming from inside CollegeClub itself. Evidently there's not much worth doing there except watching the deathclock going tick tick tick. I never could have imagined that my last laugh would be this loud!

interesting links of a related nature:
Monitor the carnage of the New Economy on The Standard's "Dot-Com Flop Tracker." (contributed by John Dewey)

CollegeClub isn't in that list, but it is in the laundry list of dot coms laying off employees. I get a kick out of how they say "Cutting costs to reach profitability more quickly."

Ah, remember the good old days when CollegeClub.com was poised to take over the world and the mighty Jim DeBello resisted the populist movement called "Draft Jim DeBello for President '00" just so he could be a second-fiddle Grand Pooh Bah in the enterprise.(those last two links contributed by Fandango Matt.)

The problem with generic content management systems - this would have been a good piece for the Schoolmarmish VP of IT to read back when she was advocating that CollegeClub.com convert to Vignette's dubious Storyserver "solution." "We're not a software company" was one of the things she used to say at the slightest provocation. This was one of several businesslike phrases she used to haphazardly string together using corporate buzzwords for punctuation, filler, and superglue. Yes, that lady sure was a hoot. She also insinuated that I was a racist on the day she fired me. Remember that old screen saver with the flying toasters? I wonder: does the schoolmarmish VP of IT ever dream of malevolent flying speakerphones?


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?000706

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