Director  

Smiling Faces

Today is the 15th anniversary of the day I registered my first domain: moshplant.com, which was the kickoff to my career (such as it was or is) as a freelance Director and Flash programmer. I don't remember picking St. Patrick's Day for any reason, in fact it wasn't until I started marking the date on my site after about ten years that I even noticed that it was March 17.

The original moshplant.com ran on a Mac Quadra 630 with an external 200MB hard drive, using StarNine's WebSTAR suite of server tools, which included a web and mail server. One of the truly cool things about WebSTAR's web server was the ability to watch the access logs in real time; I felt it gave me a very ground-level view of how things worked.

The whole thing was connected to the Internet via a dedicated phone line with a 14.4 modem connection. I had faster modems, of course, but for those of you made fat and lazy by the inexpensive high-speed access we've come to know and love, getting a static IP address even with a slow data rate wasn't cheap in those early days.

Fifteen years is a long time. Some days it seems even longer. Apropos of nothing, one of my favorite songs:

The few surviving samurai
Survey the battlefield.
Count the arms,
The legs and heads,
And then divide by five.

Drenched in blood,
They move across the screen.
Do I need
To point
Or do you
See the one I mean?

The one in back,
The way he acts,
Is he reminding you of anyone we know?
Isn't he so
Like certain people I could name?

Halfway through the 30 minutes
Halfway 'round the world.
Here's the story of
The genocidal overlord.

In her palace
With her epaulettes
Watch her little gestures
As she lights her cigarette.

Look at her you
Must see it too
Is she reminding you of anyone we know?
Isn't she so
Like certain people I could name?

Disembodied and detached
A voice describes the scene
As a lizard
Stalks a helpless
Creature on TV.

Music underscores
The tragedy.
Eyes with no expression
Watch the unsuspecting prey.

Who is it like?
Doesn't it strike
You as the very image of someone we know?
Isn't it so
Like certain people,
How could anybody
Miss the obvious
And the uncanny
And the clear resemblance?
Isn't it just
Like certain people I could name?

They Might Be Giants, "Certain People I Could Name", They Got Lost