About Operator101

Originally produced as Winter is for Suicide on Geocities.com, operator101.com is was my hobby. I originally brought together this site because I was young, had time on my hands, knew enough about HTML coding to get myself into trouble, and, finally, it were the days of Netscape 1.0. Operator101 manifested itself through a tortuous growth process that began in 1996 on a friend’s IP address at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Once the school year finished, the IP address vanished and Dan found a free website hosting service at Geocities.com. 2 megabytes of disk space was more than enough for the website but annoying pop-up banners took away the power and potency that laid quietly beneath the surface. Dan, fumbled around with CoffeeCup HTML Editor++ and stole some code from websites such as nytimes.com, espn.com, paranoia.net,  and a bolder, badder, maturer Winter is for Suicide emerged in Fall 1997. The poison ones and zeros were not yet dry on the the RGB monitors when an even newer site emerged.

I really had no idea what I was doing so I mucked around some more and stole some tables and frames and integrated them into my site. I got my hands on a copy of Photoshop 4.0 LE and redid the graphics, interface and layout of the site in a week’s burst of orgiastic energy. I then packed up my bags, threw my computer, stereo and bedding into storage and moved to the United Kingdom for six months. Winter is for Suicide languished on the Geocities.com Athens/Olympus server.

The site sat. The site waited patiently. Geocities.com kept adding more megabytes of space and by the time it was 1000% times larger then when Dan last worked on it. Yahoo! bought Geocities.com. I was caught unaware of both the new size restrictions and new ownership, came back to Alaska and attempted to add new experiences to the site. The scope. The breadth. The width. Too vast for me to comprehend in the new economy. Gone were the ancient enemies; new arose daily. I called it quits for awhile on Winter is for Suicide.

A diploma found its way into my hands. A web administration job at MosquitoNet and a postgraduate class on website design created it a new sense of purpose inside me. A heavily engineered site, relying on dynamic layers and cascading style sheets arose from this class. One-hundred scanned photos, pages of written words, a millennium to download the site. A quick look at NetworkSolutions.com and there it was, a new url to register – operator101.com. Seventy dollars later I had it and the new site was born. First thing to do: find a hosting service. I looked at C|Net and found it, Hostway.com – 200 megabytes, prearranged cgi scripts, first three months free and no setup fee – operator101 had a server at last.

The site was too bloated, too bandwidth intensive, too user agent restrictive. Another prerelease redo was done. Macromedia’s Dreamweaver and server-side-includes were the coding key while small .gifs and a uniting theme of blood red worked the visual angle. Topflight friends were included for input and for their own writings. Long hours after work to design the graphics on MosquitoNet’s computers and re-scan the images and mold them in PhotoShop 5. The end product was the first incarnation of operator101.

The site thrived. It grew strange appendages that had to be hacked off with machetes. The red theme morphed into a blue theme of joy and happiness and the quest for html greatness. Then I went to law school in Washington. The site languished. Updates were never done. My school work blossomed but, alas, operator101 shriveled and became merely a husk of its former self.

Procrastinating on my studies one night, and after toiling in the bowels of Dreamweaver, a new site emerged. That version, for nearly a year-and-a-half, survived barely untouched. With a simple plan I created a long-lasting site that rolled with the punches and never fell down for the count. Not until second year final exams came a calling that I, worried that I may actually have to study, began work in earnest on the latest version of operator101.

First things first, the website needed a new hosting service. After reading a site, I discovered Logjamming.com. Nice site run by a couple of bloggers who host other sites for a small fee. It worked.

Next, I decided on having a horizontal background. As blue is, for some unknown reason, my favorite color, I chose the light blue horizontal striped background before setting down to work on the rest of the site. Going back to my roots as a one-time web-site administrator, I chose Server-Side Includes as the backbone for the new site. After tooling around on several state government web-sites, I implemented a dynamic-layered menu at the top of each page.

Later, much later, I had moved back to Alaska. Graduated from law school and with a job. A nice weekend of working at the office and walking the dog turned into a windy and rainy Sunday. So me, in my wisdom and style, decided to redo the website. After looking at some of his older designed that he didn’t implement and some other websites, I chose to modify an old design with new elements.

In my never-ending quest this is what I have done. The process is never fully complete. Some may even say that it is the process and not the product that is important. I really don’t care.

Addendum
I’ve been muddling around with computers since the early 1980′s. I had a computer before my family owned a television with a remote control. Since my first website went live in 1997 I have invested numerous hours into writing essays and travelogues for it. I believe those have come out quite well. But, I must admit that while I retain the innate ‘knack’ for writing code, HTML coding has gotten old. I finally added a database to my website – www.operator101.com – to allow PHP on the Plesk server and downloaded WordPress. I’m still using Dreamweaver 3 for chrissakes and it’s gotten only more unreliable once I installed it on Windows XP a few years back. Actually, I recently bought a copy of Dreamweaver 8 and have begun to use it in earnest. Certainly come a long way from version 3.

I’m not sure if I’m all into this blogging thing. I’m not sure if this manner of communicating is what I would like to do. Just decided I would give it a go. Now, there is so much media coverage of blogging and some may infer that it is the second coming of sliced bread. I am not one of those people. In fact, the only blogs I do read are legal-related and except for one they are all scholarly in nature.

A primary concern is that I not lose focus of what I am doing. I am very busy at work with trials and don’t always have time to update the site. I mean this because this site is personal to me and I maintain it (at a fairly high standard for someone whose HTML skills ceased to expand in early 2000 and have only diminished mightily since) for me, friends and family. With that said, I’m not sure the everyday chatter of what goes on in my head is necessarily a good thing. I have learned to temper my voices but we shall see.

Post Addendum

It’s even later now. Several years in fact. After 25 years I’ve moved off the DOS/Windows platform and embraced Apple’s version of Unix – OS X. Approximately a decade ago I knew enough Linux/Unix command line code to get around fairly well but I remember basically nothing now so all of the fun one can have in the OS X command line is, for me at least, a pipe dream. It’s quite good to use a Mac but my Mac skills are sorely lacking. I simply know none of the little cheats and keystrokes that are common place with Windows and have been muscle-memorized into my subconscious.