Introduction

The first time the words world wide and web crossed my ears in that combined sequence, it was in the voice of Ernst Smith, my roommate for my freshman year at MIT in 1993. Ernst was a brilliant technologist with a passion for detail, as well as a generally nice guy. His casual lecturing built my foundation in networking, operating systems, and helped set my initial outlook as technology the tool, the helper, the thing we want.

Within months Ernst had me setup with Linux and a web server on my Gateway 486-66DX2 (my recent upgrade from the Apple IIGS that took me through high school) and I'd spend an embarassing number of hours paging through log files interested in who was looking at my scant web offerings which included things like my class schedule and some pictures of Cindy Crawford in a bikini. I was 17, I have no apologies. I'd get up to a few hundred hits a day if I recall -- not bad for just 3 or 4 pages of hand-typed HTML, though it was Cindy and friends that always drew the traffic. I liked seeing hits from IBM, or NIH, or Croatia.

My web server was called synergy.mit.edu and my very first IP address was 18.239.2.102. I know this because Ernst also helped me get my first job as a Residential Computing Consultant for my dorm where I was able to bill 10 bucks an hour for what DHCP now does for free. It was called Resnet, and started up toward the end of my first year. To this day, I miss having 10Mbps in my bedroom.

Jumping forward 12 years, I've just ended 4 years at a company called Akamai, teaching distributed computing technology to people our sales people would then get to sign contracts. It was an extremely useful experience, for various reasons, not the least of which is that it gave me a chance to interact with IT project managers from a huge range of interesting clients all over the western US. I met with companies as diverse as Nissan, Suzuki, Honda, Fox Sports, Warner Music Group, eHarmony.com, Ticketmaster, and Google.

I mention all of this to make this following point. From Ernst Smith who called himself a hacker and loved to revel at the elegance of competent technical architecture well at the dawn of the dot com era, to the CIOs and middle managers of late who have accepted the web as just another new place to cultivate revenue, the idea of the web has gone through my mind and spirit more times than I could ever have imagined in the fall of 1993.

And now it is the eve of May 2005, and I am about to begin my first blog -- my first homecoming to the world of completely pointless web content whose existence implies someone would want to read it. I shut down Synergy ages ago and only started up Brewnote as a necessary way to distribute audition samples and info. Between the two I never felt I was missing much. I had seen the rise and fall of the visionary fruit, and then spent years blanding myself to the juices.

But now I am possessed to emerge again, motivated by a combination of intentions. This blog will be governed only by taste and truth, and the rest can get parsed out by whatever method you prefer.

On that note, welcome to Brewnote Blog.