webmages

It’s finally done. We met with our cake guy, and selected a design. Looks like it should be pretty good. That’s the last of the big stuff for the wedding, so we’re good to go!

I took last Thursday & Friday off, and of course Monday was a holiday, so I had a 5 day weekend. Of course I didn’t just sit around, I actually worked on the townhouse. Things are finally starting to shape up. It’s nice to have a house again, versus a storage facility.

On Monday Bonnie and I went to my parents house… and this is just so funny… after lunch we were sitting outside at the picnic table, and well, Bonnie got dive bombed by a bird! (pics coming soon!) The really ironic thing is we had just talked about the very thing on Sunday when we went for a walk at Maymont Park. My family has a new nickname for her — Poo.

Well, I need some money. Getting married is expensive. Heck life is expensive. I could be one of those gimps who posts a sob story and asks for donations, but I’m not. I like to earn my just rewards.

So, I’m looking for work on web development projects on the side. I’m proficient in PHP, Cold Fusion, MySQL, HTML, and more. So if you like my site, and either want something similar or have a specialized project you want some work done on, let me know! I can also assist with setting up Linux servers and other related things, and I can work with you on the cost.

Way back when around 1994/1995 I worked for Circuit City doing telephone technical support (for computers, some of you may remember it as AnswerCity). I was also a student at VCU, and was familiar with the web and internet. I bugged and bugged people to let me create a web site for Circuit City. I knew, just knew that the internet and the web was going to be huge, and the sooner we were online, the better.

No one would listen to me though. One of the senior techs, Jason Swallow, agreed with me, and so together we launched an all out assault on management to let us do this. It would allow us to put technical support information out there, update drivers, answers to questions and issues. We knew it could be used for marketing and potentially sales as well, but internet shopping was pretty much non-existant at the time, and besides, that wasn’t our department.

So we finally got permission after many moons to begin working on this. We called it “AnswerWeb” (like “AnswerCity”, but cooler heheh.). We put our “grids”, what most people would call spec sheets of products into html format, and created a navigation system, etc. We built the site entirely using notepad.

Corporate decided they didn’t want us doing graphics (they had a department that did that, for example for their sales flyers). As was and still is typical for folks that work only in print graphics, they sent us huge high resolution tiff files that had to be scaled down and converted to GIF, and looked pretty crappy.

Anyway, some time passes, the site was approved, and we got to load it to a temporary domain, circuitcity.pic.net.

At over 200 files the site was getting a bit tough for one person to maintain, plus I was planning on taking a leave of absence to focus on school. I enlisted the help of another VCU student in the same area (telephone computer support), Ronnie Anderson, who it turns out wound up being one of my best friends, and with whom I have worked for the past 5 years.

I took my leave of absence. Awhile later I received a series of emails from Jason and Ronnie (I’m looking for those emails on old zip disks and archives). It turns out that all the techs but Ronnie, who was spending most of his time on the website, got raises. Ronnie didn’t because his average talk time wasn’t high enough because he wasn’t on the phone enough. Feeling used and abused (I mean, they gave him a plaque or trophy of some kind, but wouldn’t give him an extra $1.50 an hour), he wound up leaving CC under not the best of circumstances.

Meanwhile, I had heard from through the grapevine that CC had eliminated the positions of everyone on leave. That was ok with me, I was doing fine without them working two jobs at VCU. One at the Multimedia Development Center at MCV (where I incidentally wound up helping to create the Web Course in a Box software which was spun off into a separate company and eventually purchased by Blackboard), and at the School of Education’s computer lab.

Later that year, a break in at MCV where some of our computer equipment was stored prompted some new security rules. The door locks were upgraded, and required a key to lock. As I was a student, there was no way they were giving me a key. This cut my hours back dramatically as I had classes during the day and would often work well into the night. I don’t remember if I left at this point, or if I waited until December, but we’re getting back to Circuit City now.

December comes around, and I get a call from my old manager at CC saying I need to come in and work the holiday season. Huh? Yeah, they never took me off the rolls. So I went back to work for Circuit City’s AnswerCity, and discontinued my on-campus employment. There were hushed rumours at CC that they were closing AnswerCity down (we’d already changed from free tech support to per-incident $19.95 tech support). These rumours we thought were put to rest when we were told Circuit City had no plans to ever shut down AnswerCity.

At some point along the line, since Ronnie had left, Jason was now the webmaster, and Rich “Linux Boy” Frieburg (sp?) became the developer. The site was being hosted on a linux box provided by some isp, I think it was psinet or netcom, I can’t remember for sure. I got called off the phones to check out a problem with the ftp server returning garbage characters when people did directory listings. Oh crap! We were root-kitted!!! We identified at least 2 individuals who were accessing the box, and took it off line (they were trying to udp flood a quake server, and it seems, microsoft). Rich and I worked round the clock to get the box back up and secured. It was a mess in there. We forwarded all our logs to management. We heard the 2 people were busted, one arrested, and one suspended from school. I’m not sure how accurate this was, I’m pretty skeptical about it really.

Remember the rumours about AnswerCity closing down? Well, they were right. Circuit City had sunk a crapload of money into DivX, a scheme where you’d buy a disposable dvd for cheap that you’d have to pay to unlock on your player (or anyone elses). Consumers weren’t buying, as it was a really bad idea. They tried to transition people to other positions that were appropriate - techies to IT and such. But they had no part-time IT jobs. I was faced with the option of moving to Main Que (refrigerators, vaccums, and tv support), or being laid off. So needless to say I was laid off.

The website was then firmly in the hands of corporate. I think Jason Swallow went over there for a time, and then left CC to become the webmaster for Richfood. At some point I heard they paid Microsoft Consulting over 6 figures to redesign and engineer the site.

And now the CircuitCity website, in addition to providing “grids”, or tech specs for products allows you to purchase them.

Anyway, what brought this little trip down memory lane? Ronnie is moving, and found a diskette with an old copy of the website! Pretty cool I must say. I’m not going to post the HTML, but I’m eventually going to post some screenshots in my gallery.

If Rich or Jason, or anyone else out there has any more info, copies of old files, or just wants to get in touch, here I am!

I’ve done some hacking last night and this morning on my image gallery (not the one in the images link above, but the one I’m developing by myself). I though it might be nice to provide a link so people can check it out (even though it’s not quite ready for prime time yet, much less a public release). So, here it is.

I think I’m going to call it m-gallery and my blog m-blog, and the comments system m-comments.