I’m no longer the only Blyberg blogging (yes I know that alliterates). My sister, who quietly and modestly applies her genius at the National Galery of Art, has started a blog.

Go sis!

Five people and counting have now tagged me with this one, so I think I ought to capitulate!

1) I used to sneak into the back room in out middle-school library to use their 300 baud modem to dial into my BBS at home and check new messages. My first BBS was a little piece of software called MiniBBS, it then evolved to an RPG-like trivia game based on a piece of software called Castle Tiamat. Then, I found QuickBBS and began using that. Shortly thereafter I changed to Remote Access. I also used the Opus fido-net handler. My Fido-net number was 1:141/215. Someone still hosts an old list of nodes–search for ‘Blyberg’ and you’ll be rewarded with a good laugh–the name of my BBS.

2) I was living in Iran during the 1979 revolution. We escaped on an empty IranAir flight.

3) I used to be an extreme whitewater kayaker. Then I got a family, and now I have to be responsible. Well, I should say, now I want to be responsible. I also almost bought the farm during one paddling mishap, but I had a guardian angel with me that day and escaped with my life… and chronic back pain.

4) I fucking hate clowns. They are dirty, filthy, despicable creatures.

5) My favorite place on Earth is on the rocks, just below the lighthouse on Whitehead island in Maine, watching a full moon rise on a hot summer night while a bell buoy tolls away an eternity of incoming tides. It’s my “happy place.”

Since I’ve not been keeping up with my feed reader (about 1500+ posts to rifle through), I don’t want to look like an idiot and tag someone who has already posted. But I do know that Alan Gray hasn’t had much to say for awhile, so.. Tag Alan!

At any rate, I wanted to share the love and let the people of the world generate their own card catalog images. Usage is fairly straight-forward. Just fill out the info you’d like to see on the card and make it. Obviously, it doesn’t pull any bibliographical data from anywhere, so that leaves a lot up to your imaginations…

Please be kind to it and don’t try to incorporate this service into your own OPACs directly from here (you never know). I’ve provided the source code for that if you’re so inclined.

Enjoy!

Reference:

• Creating a virtual card catalog
• Source code for virtual card catalog images
• Share your Personal Card Catalog

** Update 9/7/2006 **

Fixed the apostrophe slash bug.

That’s sort of how I feel about this blog turning one today. Reading my first post is a lark…

4 Jobs I’ve had in my life:

• Pizza Cook
• Whitewater kayak instructor
• Wilderness trip leader
• Dad

4 Movies I can watch over and over:

• The Wall
• Blackhawk Down
• Lord of the Rings
• Dawn of the Dead

4 TV Shows I love to watch:

• West Wing
• Dirty Jobs
• 24
• Lost

4 Places I have lived:

• Tehran, Iran
• Manama, Bahrain
• Repulse Bay, Hong Kong
• London, England

4 Places I have been on holiday:

• Kuwait
• Thailand
• Morroco
• Jordan

4 of my favorite dishes:

• Penne Rustica
• Macaroni and Cheese with Kielbasa
• Lobster
• Sushi

4 Websites I visit daily:

• Google
• Google News
• Ann Arbor District Library
• Weather Underground

4 Places I would rather be right now:

• Mere Point, Maine
• The Grand Canyon
• Petra, Jordan
• 43.978333 lat -69.125000 long

4 Bloggers I am tagging:

• http://ulo.tricho.us/
• http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/
• http://blog.skagirlie.net/
• http://tametheweb.com/

I ran my first BBS on an original IBM PC with dual 360K floppies and a blazing-fast 1200 baud modem. It was great.
The first piece of software I used was called “Mount Tiamat”. It was basically a message board centered around a trivia ladder. As you answered more questions, the higher you would ascend and gain more power and responsibility for the care and upkeep of the BBS itself. It was genius.
I then moved to QuickBBS (and a 2400 baud rocket!). QuickBBS was a great modular approach to creating a BBS (and it ran well on two floppies). That was about the time I discovered FidoNet which was similar to usenet, except message digests were skipped around the country over modem from one telephone district to another. I actually came across this FidoNet host list not too long ago. Search for “blyberg” and you’ll see my cheesily-named system (you’ll have to search it for the pleasure).
BBSs provided a sense of local community that is gone now. It just no longer exists. In less than a few months, it went away in 1992. Talk about social software.

so I took up mudding, and that ruined my grades. Mudding was great, and still is, though I no longer do it.
I was an “Imm” on a Wheel Of Time-based CircleMud for awhile. From about 1992-1995, Mudding had a golden age. It was wonderful, because not only was it a social meeting place, but it was a collaborative programming environment. I’m sure quite a few CS students cut their teeth on C while programming Muds.

You might remember the days when IRC truly was the wild west.
If you wanted to hold down a channel, you needed multiple bots in disparate geographical locations to protect against someone hacking ops on a net-split.
You literally had to program your soldiers to guard against clones (back in those days, ircd wasn’t equipped to handle clones). If you didn’t do this, you could wind up with 30 clonebots in your channel before you knew it and you’d be wiped out with the dreaded “Excess Flood”. Since “shells” were scarce back then you generally had to work with people all over the globe to ensure yours bots worked together. Yah, that was social software.

Then of course there is Nethack. I’m not sure ascending is something to be proud of. I know my grades sure didn’t ascend due to Nethack! That was anti-social software.

What this all boils down to, I guess, is that I have a love affair with the command-line era. I always will. The type of social connections that we used to make just don’t happen anymore. Those days are gone.

Hark!

I’d love to see teens rallied to a Nethack tournament. I doubt it would be terribly difficult to develop a scoring module API. If you had a strong-enough base of gamers already, you might just be able to get the players.

An even more blue-sky idea would be a library mud where players could log into a virtual library, search stacks, talk, and fight. Of course it could contain multiple libraries, private “reading rooms”, conference areas, message boards. The possibilities really could be endless.

No, those days are gone. That time had a personality of its own, but I’m seeing glimpses of a new personality emerge in memes and tags and giant calculators and librarians all obsessing over blogs.

And, really, it’s happening for the right reasons with libraries.

Never having been to an Internet Librarian, I had no idea what to expect, but I can now say that is was a wonderful three days among some very intelligent and articulate people. I tend to feel smaller, literally, when I’m around that kind of brain power.

Anyway, I’ll write more tomorrow after I sleep, and I’ll post my presentation as well.

In the meantime, check out the Flickr feed for IL2005 and see the glitterati for yourself. And read all about it.

Zonk.