Mmmm Indian

[dagibbs]

So, I'm spending Friday night in Springfield, rather than Monett, causing I'm flying out in the morning and it is easier this way. So, I asked the clerk at the hotel for an Indian or Thai restaurant. He suggested an Indian one, it was most of the way accross town, but Springfield isn't that big of a place, so I headed off. Mm.... food with flavour. Ok, BBQ is flavour, and I did go to the BBQ place the last couple of nights... but still, this was a good change.

Tomorrow is going to be a LONG day... hope I hold up for it. Get up, airport, Springfield->Detroit->Ottawa, then get home in Ottawa. Unpack, re-pack, and drive to Montreal. Party in Montreal until, if history is any indicator, all hours of the morning. Ok, if I don't pass out from exhaustion before the party is half over, of course.

And, it looks like I'll be going to Lunacon with foms next weekend. Yes, we have verified, twice over, that this the correct weekend, and that we won't arrive there only to find that we'd arrived early for the convention. A week early.

Comments

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

Most of the story is right there. Some, no make that many, years ago foms and I decided to go to Lunacon, booked a hotel room, booked the time off from work, and drove down to Rye Brook, New York for the convention. When we got there, we discovered, much to our chagrin, that Lunacon was not that weekend, but the following weekend. We cancelled our reservations and turned around to go home, only to find that most of the way home was completely buried in a massive snow storm. We overnighted somewhere on the way back with some relatives of foms, 2nd cousins or some such, then made our way the rest of the way home. Yes, we were laughed at by a number of our friends.

When foms called me, earlier this week, to ask if I wanted to go to Lunacon next weekend, my first response was, "are you sure this is a good idea?", and my second was, "are you sure it is that weekend?". I verified on their web site that it was the correct weekend.

(The failed attempt was before the web was nearly as prevalent as it is now. )

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

Joe Casey did the same thing when coming to Toronto Trek a couple of years ago.

The scary thing was, Joe was on concom, and still got the date wrong...

[foms.livejournal.com]

I think that it may have been before the web. The net was around but I hadn't even seen the web yet. 1991, was it?

My response was that we had to break the jinx.[g]

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

If it was 1991, our little journey was probably overlapping in time with the creation and deployment of the world's first webserver.

From a bit of history (http://www.hitmill.com/internet/web_history.asp):

User Interface
A line-mode user interface (named at CERN, the world wide web or www) was completed in late 1989. The interface was used on a minor network in March 1991. May 1991 was the first time that the information-sharing system using HTML, HTTP, and a client software program (www) was fully operational on the multiplatform computer network at the CERN laboratories in Switzerland.

File Availability
The availability of CERN's files was announced in the UseNET newsgroup, alt.hypertext, in August 1991. This was the first time that the availability of the files was announced to the public.

"Web Server"
All of the documents coded with HTML elements were stored on one main computer at CERN. This special type of computer was called a "web server" (by the physicists at CERN) because it "served-up" batches of cross-linked HTML documents. There was only one Web server located at CERN, but by the end of 1992 there were over 50 Web servers in the world. Many of these earliest Web servers were located at universities or other research centers. These servers were using line-mode interfaces.

[foms.livejournal.com]

I thought as much. I remember seeing the web early on when a friend at McGill (who was running a computer lab) was showing off the cool, new shiny thing.