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Yes, I know it has been a long time since I've done a blog entry. Mostly I've been posting to Twitter and Facebook lately, and hopefully this site will get a much-needed overhaul in the coming year. In the meantime, when I'm not posting here, you can find me at:
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JasonCross/
Facebook: http://facebook.com/JasonMPCross
Flickr: http://flickr.com/JasonCross
YouTube: http://youtube.com/IOIIOOO
With the '00s coming to an end, I thought it would be fun to look back at 10 year ago.
10 years ago...
... I had just sold CrossPaths - my dialup ISP - to Lighthouse Communications earlier in the month, Dottie Lu was my office manager, and I was in the process of hiring Phil to help me grow the company further.
... The CrossPaths website looked like this: http://web.archive.org/web/19991128145512/http://crosspaths.net/ and it looked good for the time, darn it!
... 56K was just starting to be widely available.
... I had never blogged.
... I didn't own a digital camera.
... I didn't own a traditional camera.
... Photography wasn't even a hobby of mine.
... I had not yet gone on my first (of many) trips to Mexico with the family.
... I didn't have an MP3 player (though I did have a handful of MP3s on my computer by that point).
... I didn't own the domain jasoncross.com yet.
... I was living in an apartment with Ian, and I was in the process of closing on the purchase of my first house.
... 256MB of RAM was a LOT of RAM and cost ~$250.
... 80GB of hard drive space was HUGE and cost ~$400.
... Windows98 Second Edition was the standard OS. Windows Me had not yet started its short run, and Windows XP was still 1.5 years away.
... I was assuming that if Y2K turned out to be pretty bad, I'd be out of a career having few non-technical skills at the time.
... My nephew Nate was just born and my nephew Sebastian was 2.
... The Palm Pilot IIIe was cutting edge and email on a portable device other than a laptop with a dialup modem was pretty much unheard of.
... None of my friends were yet married, and now nearly all of them are.
... I was still 4.5 years away from meeting my future wife.
Living day to day, it's easy to forget how much things actually change in a relatively short period of time. Writing this list reminded me of an article I wrote for my old column in the Des Moines Register. It's called Velocitized and it can be read by clicking this link, but here's an excerpt:
Excerpt from Over Your Head column "Velocitized"
By Jason Cross
Originally printed May 1, 2001 in the Des Moines Register
Twenty years ago, Yahoo was a term for excitement, Google was 10 to the 100th power, and the term "web browser" conjured images of scientists studying spiders. Names like dot-com, Netscape, and hyperlink were little more than nonsense.
Riding in a fast-moving car, the mind quickly gets used to the sensation of speed, making the passenger lose their sense of velocity. In driver's education class, this is called being "velocitized." The wealth of change associated with technology's evolution is much the same.
In a society where rapid changes in technology have become commonplace over the last generation, it is easy to get used to the fast pace.
We rarely realize the broad changes taking place around us, but twenty years from now we will see this time as the birth of such things as broadband and digital audio/video. The advance of technology continues as fast as ever. We are just velocitized.
Happy 2010 Everyone! |
