Aug
24
2003Skeletons in the USENET Closet
24
2003
Damn, Google makes it mighty difficult to forget about the past, for anyone who’s ever touched the Internet. I was Googling my own name (hoping to find other people with the same name, as someone sent email inquiring if I was a certain person from their past), and I decided to click on “Groups”, to see what I could find in there. All I can say is: “Ouch”.
The first message was:
Apparently, I had sold an Amiga to someone via a newsgroup WAY back in 1995 and I took longer than expected to get it mailed. It took me a while to search the memory banks, but I DEFINITELY did not rip this guy off. I vaguely remember receiving an apology to his flame-o-gram after I explained the delay… Unfortunately, if anyone ever “Group Googles” me in the future, I’m branded forever with this as the first result. Swell.
Next, we journey into the “Lone-Wolf.net” project. This was a web site I set up in 1998 as a sort of bulletin board for amateur game developers to list their projects. It actually attracted quite a few developers. The most famous patron was Geoff Howland of Lupine Games, which was made semi-famous (semi-infamous?) by the bargain bin game “Hatfields and McCoys“. The reviews for it were, well, less than good, but, hell, what have YOU made that got stocked by Wal*Mart?
You can actually see the site as it appeared in 1998 via the Wayback Machine.
Now here’s the part that really makes me shudder… You will spot a couple of Multi-Level-Marketing related messages… This was a VERY brief blip in my past that I REALLY would like to forget, thank you very much. I was young, I was naive, and I was broke. After that little venture, I was young, naive, and even more broke. Let that be a lesson to you. Ugh… Moving on.
Something much less embarrassing was a piece of software I actually developed, and came very close to selling… It was called “Email Monster“, and it claimed to “eliminate absolutely all unwanted mail!”. Basically, it was a proxy between your mail reader and your POP mail server, which operated on black- and white- lists and automatically requested confirmation from unknown senders, much like a lot of newer anti-spam tools do today. But this was 5 years ago, man! I was a visionary! Unfortunately, EMM was very buggy and my software development chops were not quite up to par, and I found it impossible to debug, and eventually gave up. Incidentally, it was written in Borland C++ Builder - an awesome tool that got no respect. Unfortunately, emalmonster.com is not in the Wayback Machine archive for some reason. It had a REALLY hideous color scheme, so it’s probably for the better. The domain name appears to be owned by some advertising company now.
And, just to wrap this up by utterly humiliating myself… Here’s a USENET PERSONAL AD from 1995. Ugh. Good God, it actually says I’m not looking for an “Anna Nicole Smith type”… That meant something a lot different eight years ago… But, again, I’m clearly a visionary.