<brain_dump date="03/16/01">It Seemed Like Such A Good Idea ...Back in the midst of the Internet hysteria, way back in the fall of 1999, I had a brain-spark (brain-fart?). A whole bunch of semi-literate tools had made fortunes developing and quickly selling half-baked "content" websites. So I decided to make one of my own. I didn't even intend to get rich off it. My original purpose was to stop the avalanche of e-mail I dropped on my relatives and friends and put all my opinions in one place, to be updated weekly. Maybe others would appreciate my "wit" and "humor" and offer to pay me for my "commentary." Yeah, and pigs fly. So, working closely with my brother, who actually worked at a would-be dot.com (which bombed a long time before the BIG ONE hit the net world), I built my own little website, tomslinx.net. Don't look for it now because my free host died off and I'm too cheap and too lazy to keep it going in any sustainable format (hence the website you now see, provided free with my $40/month cable modem). Anyway, we wrote a couple of perl scripts to aggregate my comments and links into a weekly page and I'd write a "topper" commentary on something. Plus, I tried my hand at some film and music reviews and even wrote a couple of newsy pieces. In retrospect, most of it was crap. However, some parts were pretty clever and some of my comments about the coming dot.bomb were pretty right-on (and very few people were saying them in late 1999 and early 2000). I learned a ton and definitely formed a bunch of strong opinions about topics like freedom of speech online, the open-source software movement and ICANN, the quasi-government body charged with "regulating" the Internet (let's just clear the air here -- I hate ICANN, but I'm definitely not alone, so I don't need to go on at length). And I had a lot of fun trying to write a few hundred words of semi-coherent opinions each week. But alas, my original vision never came to fruition. I included e-mail links after each opinion nugget and hoped my "audience" would engage me in CONVERSATIONS that I could keep going each week. Never happened. Turns out people want to CONSUME web content but my crowd's not really the chatroom crowd. So it go to be a lonely and pretty thankless labor (although, in fairness, people did say they enjoyed the weekly read). I wasn't competent enough with web design to create an easy chat-board setup, where people could post comments and argue and discuss and diss me or each other or whatever else they felt like. So the Linx never evolved beyond a monologue, and monologues get old once the ego wears off. The postings dropped off after April 2000 and I let the site die off when my host turned off their server (they were the victims of an unsustainable idea -- provide free Internet hosting to open-source related sites, hoping to glom onto any profitable development that might occur on their servers). Since some of things we did on the Linx were kind of cool, I decided to preserve the best parts. Check back occasionally because I'll pick out some of the better "commentary" and put that up here too. Here's what's here right now:
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