SuBBrilliant Blog

Russ Pitts, former Half Price Books Computer Section Manager, Head of Insomnia Productions, Producer of SuBBrilliant TV, writer for SuBBrilliant News, and one-time Line Producer of The Screen Savers, wrote a long, involved, insightful reminscence of his years at TechTV.

This paragraph sums it up:

I laugh now when I hear the phrase Web 2.0, not because I think it’s an inherently stupid concept (it isn’t), but because back when Web 1.0 was barely in its adolescence, The Screen Savers was already pushing the envelope, stretching that bitch at the seams and wanting more. So we created TV 2.0, in which you were part of the show, and even if you never called in, never logged in or sent in an email, watching other people do so, you knew that you could. You knew that we cared. Because we did. It was all for you. Yes, we were having the fucking time of our lives, but we were doing it for you, because we’d been there on the other end of that TV screen thinking nobody understood why these things were so important to us, and we knew how lonely it could be. And we wanted you to know you weren’t alone.

Thanks for that Russ. I mean it. It makes me even more proud to have worked there to have it expressed that way.

Read the whole thing at FalseGravity.com.

I started playing around with Ancestry.com, which is a fascinating site for genealogical research. They have tons of primary sources from several countries, including census reports, marriage records, etc. I even found a scan of my Great Grandfather’s World War I draft registration card, in his own handwriting.

One cool feature is the ability to import other people’s trees if you share an ancestor. This can make quick work of tracing some lines. I was able to trace a line form my Father’s Mother back to King Edward of England. In fact, once you can do a neat trick like that, you can take advantage of some enterprising folks tress that include the genealogies of the middle ages.

Back then, any noble worth his salt tried to trace his line back to Roman Emperors. And of course Roman Emperors traced THEIR lines through Alexander the Great to Hercules and thus to the gods.

All of this means, I’m descended from Zeus, and here’s the breadcrumb trail to prove it. Click on the thumbnail to get the full image.

It’s not an exact match, and certainly not scientific, but you can see some historic cycles by looking at things that chracterise certain decades.

1820s – War/Recovery (If anything recovery from 1814 but tenuous)
1830s – Promise (Railroad construction booms)
1840s – Turmoil (Mexican-American War)
1850s – Depression (1850s depression, Bleeding Kansas)
1860s – War/Recovery (Civil War, Transcontinental railroad, death of Lincoln)
1870s – Promise (Telephone, light bulb, phonograph, reconstruction)
1880s – Turmoil (electricity, cars, new imperialism)
1890s – Depression (Panic of 1893, depression)
1900s – War/Recovery (End of Phillipine-American war)
1910s – Promise (Relativity, X-rays, radio, Hollywood, World War I)
1920s – Turmoil (Flappers, Roaring 20s)
1930s – Depression (Great Depression)
1940s – War/Recovery (WWII)
1950s – Promise (TV)
1960s – Turmoil (Vietname, hippies)
1970s – Depression (Stagflation)
1980s – War/Recovery (Cold war)
1990s – Promise (Peace, tech boom, Internet)
2000s – Turmoil (World Trade Center, Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorism)
2010s – Depression
2020s – War/Recovery

I scanned and uploaded an old health pamphlet called “Your body and how it works.” I put it up on Flickr. The best part is the illustrations.

Link

I have to admit this picture creeps me out. It’s the eagle crest of the nazi warship Montevideo Graf Spee being pullled out of the sea off the coast of Uruguay. From the MSNBC article:

Divers have been working on and off since 1998 to recover the ship piece by piece, part of a multimillion-dollar effort by Argentine and German investors to refloat remains of the Nazi fleet and open a museum.

While I admire the objective preservation of history, I just have to say seeing Nazi stuff in the light of day is a bit spooky.