Intro part one
I feel like a massive follower today.
I am finally part of the massive, immense, evolutionary blogosphere.
Soon, I will also resume my place in the podcasting world.
I'm sure most of you reading (read: probably just you) are going to do a double take at that remark, but it's true nontheless that I can claim, with some modicum of modesty (ha!), to be a grandfather of the podcasting revolution.
In '97 and '98, I ran a small website called AlmostLive! On this site, a downloadable audio file was available and rotated as new episodes were created. Old ones lasted nearly a month before sent to the archives (a.k.a. my P100 Toshiba Satellite laptop's then-voluminous 5 GB hard drive, then through massive permutations to a CD-R). Most of the content was music files from the 'net, with no shortage of audio commentary and some random people's thoughts.
Most fun was during the '98 pennant race, where I stood outside Wrigley Field (dyed-in-the-wool Northsider) with my trusty MiniDisc recorder and a not-half-bad microphone, asking people their thoughts on the game (which the Cubs won, though they eventually lost the series if I recall correctly). I mixed it on my laptop, encoded it, published it.
Man, those were the days. Before peer-to-peer made finding music online trivial (most of the stuff I found was on foreign http servers, the rest was ftp). Before the recording industry and the movie industry monitored the web and slapped j. random person with a lawsuit. Before broadband was a common word, and sharing a T3 with a couple hundred other people meant speed.
I'm easily one of the old hands of the online world.
A little about me. As you could probably tell from the above, I'm in Chicago, one of the most diverse cities in the United States. I live within spitting distance of Wrigley, and have for almost all of my life. I'm a partisan of the Chicago Cubs, and love the feel of the ancient ivy-covered walls of the Friendly Confines. I'm a soccer (or football, for those of you outside North America) fanatic; I cheered loudest when the Greek team won the Euro 2004 tournament. I'm a pure-bred Greek, with it going back in my family no less than three generations.
But the above doesn't explain the blog's title, Terminal Wanderlust.
I have had the itch to travel since.. well, as far back as I can remember. I never slept on car rides, no matter how long, so I could take in as much of the varied (in theory; most of the time it was/is random farmland) landscapes we would pass by. On planes, I would stare wide-eyed at the nanoscopic figures on the patches of black, yellow, blue, and green, studying the details of the whorls and curves of farms, the undulations of the roads, the waves of the lakes and sea.
My goal is to set foot on every nation on this earth before the end of the decade, and make my passport so full of marks and stamps as to nearly fall apart under the incredible strain.
And, friends, my goal is to share my travels with you.
In the meantime, I'm working as a courier, moving stuff from one place to another. I intend to write about the odd things I see in my job, odd things in the news, offbeat thoughts in life.
Well.. there's my 500 words. Good night.
cya
drew
d dot valued at gmail dot com
I am finally part of the massive, immense, evolutionary blogosphere.
Soon, I will also resume my place in the podcasting world.
I'm sure most of you reading (read: probably just you) are going to do a double take at that remark, but it's true nontheless that I can claim, with some modicum of modesty (ha!), to be a grandfather of the podcasting revolution.
In '97 and '98, I ran a small website called AlmostLive! On this site, a downloadable audio file was available and rotated as new episodes were created. Old ones lasted nearly a month before sent to the archives (a.k.a. my P100 Toshiba Satellite laptop's then-voluminous 5 GB hard drive, then through massive permutations to a CD-R). Most of the content was music files from the 'net, with no shortage of audio commentary and some random people's thoughts.
Most fun was during the '98 pennant race, where I stood outside Wrigley Field (dyed-in-the-wool Northsider) with my trusty MiniDisc recorder and a not-half-bad microphone, asking people their thoughts on the game (which the Cubs won, though they eventually lost the series if I recall correctly). I mixed it on my laptop, encoded it, published it.
Man, those were the days. Before peer-to-peer made finding music online trivial (most of the stuff I found was on foreign http servers, the rest was ftp). Before the recording industry and the movie industry monitored the web and slapped j. random person with a lawsuit. Before broadband was a common word, and sharing a T3 with a couple hundred other people meant speed.
I'm easily one of the old hands of the online world.
A little about me. As you could probably tell from the above, I'm in Chicago, one of the most diverse cities in the United States. I live within spitting distance of Wrigley, and have for almost all of my life. I'm a partisan of the Chicago Cubs, and love the feel of the ancient ivy-covered walls of the Friendly Confines. I'm a soccer (or football, for those of you outside North America) fanatic; I cheered loudest when the Greek team won the Euro 2004 tournament. I'm a pure-bred Greek, with it going back in my family no less than three generations.
But the above doesn't explain the blog's title, Terminal Wanderlust.
I have had the itch to travel since.. well, as far back as I can remember. I never slept on car rides, no matter how long, so I could take in as much of the varied (in theory; most of the time it was/is random farmland) landscapes we would pass by. On planes, I would stare wide-eyed at the nanoscopic figures on the patches of black, yellow, blue, and green, studying the details of the whorls and curves of farms, the undulations of the roads, the waves of the lakes and sea.
My goal is to set foot on every nation on this earth before the end of the decade, and make my passport so full of marks and stamps as to nearly fall apart under the incredible strain.
And, friends, my goal is to share my travels with you.
In the meantime, I'm working as a courier, moving stuff from one place to another. I intend to write about the odd things I see in my job, odd things in the news, offbeat thoughts in life.
Well.. there's my 500 words. Good night.
cya
drew
d dot valued at gmail dot com
posted by Drew Vallas at 11:00 PM
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