By David Monaghan & Claude Fable 5.1

Byline note: the old blog is mine, every word of it, and so is the night it came back. The drafting is Claude Fable 5.1's, written from the blog's own feed rather than from memory, with the old posts quoted as they were written. The pictures are the ones the old posts used, my DeviantArt and Flickr uploads from 2004 and 2005, and the Internet Archive's copy of the blog as it looked in November 2007.

The blog in November 2007, nine months after its last post. Every button in that right column is a feed reader that no longer exists.

On the night of 7 October, WordPress.com sent me a handful of emails. Sign-in links. A password reset. All for a blog called Upgrade, at upgrade.wordpress.com, and none of them from me. Someone, or more likely a bot, was knocking on a door I had forgotten was there. The links only go to my inbox, so they got nowhere. But I logged in, and I read the whole thing.

Upgrade started on 18 December 2005, when I was 22. The last post went up on 24 February 2007, four months before the first iPhone shipped. Then I moved on, and for almost twenty years it sat where I left it. The counter says 4,080 hits. The sidebar still has a Slashdot feed that works and four other feeds that do not, with a note on each saying the feed is probably down. The blogroll, the "Webapps I Use" list and "My Diggs" are all gone, because the services behind them are gone.

This post is the tour. I left a short note over there pointing here, so if you arrived from the old place, welcome. This is where I write now.

What 2006 looked like from my desk

The posts are short, and most of them are me pointing at something I had just found. That was the form then. You read Digg and TechCrunch, you tried the thing, you wrote three paragraphs so your friends would try it too.

PowerShell, before it was PowerShell. In July 2006 I installed Windows PowerShell RC1 on an XP machine and told everyone to go get it. I still called it Monad, the codename, because a Channel 9 demo video had kept that name in my head for months. The post says I had learned nothing about it yet beyond that video. That was enough to recommend it. I would not write it that way now, but I was right about the tool.

Windows Vista RC1, build 5600, on a Compaq laptop. I ran the public release candidate on a desktop and on a Compaq 2405US for a couple of months and wrote up what I called a humorous evaluation. The verdict, quoted: "it's about the same as XP but it's a bit faster and looks way prettier." I could keep a machine up for about a week before Firefox ate every resource and I had to reboot.

A Windows Vista desktop on a green leaf wallpaper, with Flip 3D fanning out a stack of windows: a Rails tutorial in Firefox, Photoshop, the Reliability and Performance Monitor with its CPU and disk graphs, several terminals, and a firewall log. The corner reads Windows Vista (TM) RC1 Evaluation copy, Build 5600, 4:46 AM, Monday, 11/6/2006.

_Build 5600 on the laptop, 4:46 in the morning. The caption I gave it on Flickr: 25% CPU usage running Remote Desktop, MySQL, WEBrick, Photoshop and Firefox, on a Compaq upgraded to 638 MB of memory._ The search box in the Start menu was the feature I loved most, because for the first time searching for a file on my own computer returned results quickly. The Bluetooth headset worked without installing a driver, which in XP had taken me a day. And my friend Lee, told that the voice recognition sort of worked, replied: "Open the pod bay doors, Windows." "Windows cannot do that, Dave."

A podcast with a phone number. In December 2006 I started a show called Programming Programming on TalkShoe, a service where the host dialed into a conference line and listeners could call in on a real telephone. The post gives out the number and the Talkcast ID. TalkShoe paid hosts by listener count, and I reported that I already had "a few bucks on there." There was a category on the blog called Midnight Techbrief, and the last post links to episode 2. I do not know if the audio survives anywhere. I suspect not.

The dream computer. In June 2006 I turned an email to a friend into a post. It names Pricewatch, TigerDirect and Outpost as the places to buy parts, with a warning that a better deal always exists but the risk is in the retailer. Then it lists the machine I wanted. Two 64-bit processors at 2.5 GHz. A 500 GB hard drive, 7200 rpm, Seagate if possible. Two gigabytes of RAM per stick. A 512 MB graphics card, with DVI as an optional extra. A floppy drive, "if possible." The server version wanted four terabytes in RAID and redundant power. The phone in my pocket now beats the desktop on every line except the floppy.

The iPhone, from the outside. The last post, in February 2007, is about eBay. People were selling Gmail and Hotmail addresses with "iphone" in them for hundreds of dollars, and every bidder had a feedback score of zero.

An eBay listing titled LOOK!!! iPhone.Authorized.Seller@gmail.com WOW!!, with a photo of the original iPhone, a winning bid of US $76.00, ended Feb-23-07, free shipping, item location Honolulu, 9 bids, and a winning bidder with a feedback score of 0.

_The screenshot from the post. Seventy-six dollars for a Gmail address, sold to a bidder with no history._ I worked through the theories: future retailers, spammers wanting attractive addresses, or sellers bidding against themselves to catch someone searching for an actual phone. I wrote that I was emailing eBay, PayPal, Google, Yahoo and Hotmail to ask, and that I hoped to have an answer soon. There was no follow-up. The iPhone shipped, the auctions stopped mattering, and the blog went quiet.

The one about writing

The post I was most surprised by is from May 2006, titled "Columnist or Reporter?" I had been blogging for a while across several sites, none of them popular, and I started asking what kind of writer I was. I decided a columnist is the driving force behind their own content, and a reporter is expected to cite sources and chase unbiased information. I called myself a columnist, at least on that blog, and said I was researching what it would take to be the other thing.

Two things in that post still hold.

The first is the reason I gave for writing at all: it made me better at writing. Not readers, not ads. The post says so plainly. Twenty years on, that is still the honest reason this blog exists, with the added twist that half of it is now drafted by a model from my own notes and repositories. The byline at the top of every post says which half.

The second is a line near the end. I floated recording posts as audio, and one of the reasons was that information "for the blind would probably be much smoother in such a format rather than through the use of a speech synthesis application." I had no idea in 2006 that I would end up printing Braille on a business card and pitching websites on the argument that a page built for a screen reader is a page built for everyone. But it was already in there.

The dream computer, twenty years later

The June 2006 wish list deserves a side-by-side, because the machine I am writing this on is roughly what that list was reaching for, bought for about what one of those parts cost then.

The list wanted two 64-bit processors at 2.5 GHz or better. This box has one chip, an Intel Core i7-10700K, with eight cores and sixteen threads at 3.8 GHz. The list wanted 2 GB of RAM per stick and as many sticks as the board would hold. There is 64 GB in here. The list wanted a 512 MB graphics card with DVI as a bonus. The card is an RTX 3060 with 12 GB, and it spends most of its day running a speech-to-text model and a local judge model for my own tools, which is a job the 2006 list had no line for.

Storage is where the gap is widest. The dream desktop wanted a 500 GB drive, 7200 rpm, Seagate if possible. The dream server wanted four terabytes in RAID with redundant power. Today there is a 1 TB NVMe drive for the system, a 500 GB NVMe beside it, and two 4 TB spinning drives for media and backups, so the desktop alone holds twice what the server was meant to. The wired network line asked for gigabit; the board has 2.5 gigabit, and the wireless is Wi-Fi 6E, three generations past the "perhaps n?" I wrote with a question mark.

Two lines did not survive. The list asked for a floppy drive, "if possible." There is no floppy. And it asked for "the largest screen with the lowest depth," ideally two. There are three on the desk, the biggest a 27 inch 1440p panel, plus a fourth that does not exist: a headless output I use to take screenshots without anything appearing in front of me.

The line that aged best is the first one under the desktop heading: "quiet if possible." Still the hardest spec to meet.

The year before the blog

The blog was not the first place I put things online. A year earlier, between December 2004 and March 2005, I uploaded twenty-one pieces to DeviantArt, and the first of them is a screenshot of the upload itself.

"Deviant Newbie," 1 December 2004. Opera, with the sidebar open. I was 21 and in Chandler, Arizona.

The profile on that page says more about me than the blog ever did. Favourite band: Tool. Operating system: "They all have something useful." Shell of choice: sh/bash. Tools of the trade: Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Fireworks, The Gimp, Blender, Wings 3D, POV-Ray, FL Studio and cSound. Not one of those tools is installed on this machine now. The shell line has not changed in twenty-two years.

The rest of the gallery is photographs, most of them taken around Arizona and on the drive to the coast, and a few of them pushed through Photoshop until they stopped being photographs.

A desert road at sunset, a power line running to the vanishing point, the whole sky filled with pink and grey cloud. — "Powerline clouds," December 2004. The road out of Chandler.

A snow-covered volcanic peak seen from an airliner window, with a thin layer of cloud below and the horizon curving away. — "Airplane Window," February 2005.

A self-portrait inverted to blue and yellow: a face in deep blue with glowing eyes against a sky that has been turned the colour of brass, inside a rough torn-paper border. — "Somewhat Human," February 2005. A self-portrait, inverted. The month the uploads stopped.

A flyer on a torn red and black background: Halloween Costume Benefit Concert at The Clubhouse, Oct. 29 2005, 6:30 pm, 1320 E. Broadway Rd, Tempe AZ, $10.00 without costume, $7.00 with, all ages, with a hand-drawn map and the bands Stop, Real, Vistalance and Brew Crew. Proceeds benefit Samantha Thorn, a victim of recurring lymphoblastic leukemia. — October 2005, two months before the blog. A flyer I made for a benefit show in Tempe, one of the last things I posted anywhere before Upgrade started.

The DeviantArt account is still up, at the same address, with the same twenty-one pieces. Nobody has tried to break into that one yet.

Scott

The post I am gladdest survived is from 13 May 2006, and it is barely a post. It is titled "TFFA," and most of it is a Google Talk conversation with my friend Scott Layton, pasted in with our names in bold. We had both been reading the Wikipedia article on internet slang, and Scott noticed something about the word "lol" that the article did not mention. Here is the whole thing, exactly as it went, typos and all.

Scott: its funny, noe that i look at "lol", of all the things it says about it on the site, it never mentions anything about the fact that "lol" looks like a person laughing

l-l =straight face lol = laughing face

b

oops

dob HA! now it has ears

monaghan: that's odd, I never saw that but you're right. I thought at first when I started trying to see it that perhaps it was o = head and ll = arms raised up, but that didn't make much sense

Scott: l-l

monaghan: I never raise my arms to laugh but you know

Scott: lol

dob

hell yeah, i raise my arms and flail them around just to talk regularly

monaghan: rotfl

Scott: l-l

dob

l-l

dob

hhhmmmmm

monaghan: lol, that's how we should do it…

Scott: what, like this: dob

monaghan: l-l.. lol……..l-l

to show, I wasn't laughing, then I was for a while, then I stopped

Scott: yeah, then if someone is trying to be funny and they are not actually funny, you could just give them a

monaghan: dob

Scott: ………………………………………..l-l

like that

monaghan: lol

heall yeah

Scott: thats great

monaghan: too funny for acronyms, I mean tffa

which could be a spin off on tff (too fukin funny)

man we are good at this internet slang shit

I'm so going to add what we're talking about here to the WP IS article

wsjatis

awsjtia

(we should just always talk in slang)

(actually we should just talk in acronyms)

lol tff miggp

(man I gotta go piss) actually I don't I just thought it sounded funny

Scott: TFG

monaghan: rotflmao

Nobody has used "tffa" since, and I never did add it to Wikipedia. Scott died some years later, of a brain aneurysm. I did not know, when I pasted that chat into a blog nobody read, that it would be one of the few conversations with him I would still have word for word. It is the best argument I know for writing things down while they are happening. The old blog kept it when I did not, and that alone is reason enough to leave the blog standing.

What else is in the capsule

The post about Net Neutrality and Moore's Law recommends TWiT, Security Now!, Cranky Geeks and the Ruby on Rails Podcast, and reads all of them in Netvibes. Security Now! is still going. Netvibes is not.

That same post has a complaint I could have written last week: Firefox crashed in the middle of a long draft, WordPress.com had no autosave, and I lost the whole thing. My fix was to draft in Writely, which had autosave, revision history and more than one person editing at once. Writely became Google Docs a few months later. I now draft posts in a text file that a script turns into the published page, and the script was written by the model that helps write the posts. The reflex is the same. Put the words somewhere that will not lose them.

There is a post about Google Trends the week it launched, with a search I will not repeat in the title here. And the whole thing is licensed Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.5, which was what you did in 2006 if you had read enough Lessig.

A lot of the links are dead. YubNub, del.icio.us, Froogle, Ning, the Compaq product page, the Digg thread. Where the Internet Archive has a copy I have pointed the old posts at it, so the references still resolve to something.

Why keep it

I could delete the account. The bot that woke it up is a reason to, and the password is now something a bot will not guess.

But I am keeping it, for the same reason I keep the floppy-drive line in the dream spec. It is a record of what a 22-year-old thought was worth three paragraphs, written the week it happened, by the person it happened to. That is not something I can reconstruct now. Reading it, I recognise the writer. He points at things and says "try this." He gives out his phone number too freely. He starts a podcast before he has the second episode planned. He asks big questions about journalism and then signs off with "hope everyone had a good Sunday."

This blog is the same writer with better tools and a longer memory. The note I left over there ends with the only sign-off that blog ever deserved. Thanks for upgrading.

Read the old blog →As it was in 2007

The Blog I Forgot: Upgrade, 2005 to 2007