Master of my Domain

casey.com, Technology

“Are you Master of your Domain?”
“I am King of the County. You?”
“Lord of the Manor.”
“I’m Queen of the castle!”
– Jerry, George and Elaine, in “The Contest“, Seinfeld, aired 11/18/92

I didn’t know her. Her name was Kathleen Creighton, but she went by ‘Casey’, presumably a reference to her initials. Kathleen was well known on one of the earliest online communities, The Well (her WELL username was ‘casey’). She was the BBS/online service reviewer for the San Francisco Bay Area computer newspaper MicroTimes, and a contributor to WIRED magazine’s Street Cred section. And, she was a tech savvy online pioneer who staked a digital claim on the domain name ‘casey.com’ when she registered it in August of 1994. It was a time when the word, domain, would for many first bring to mind an episode of Seinfeld which added ‘master of my domain’ into our modern lexicon. But speak of an internet ‘domain name’, and you’d likely draw a blank stare.

That’s what writer Joshua Quittner found and reported in his October ‘94 WIRED magazine article “Billions Registered”, in which he described the surprising number of Fortune 500 companies who had not registered their domain names, many of which had no idea what a domain name was or why they would want one. To demonstrate his point, Quittner registered the domain ‘mcdonalds.com’ in the process of educating the McDonalds Corporation what it was and why they should care. He ended that article inviting readers to email him at ronald@mcdonalds.com to offer suggestions on what he should do with the domain. He eventually relinquished it to McDonalds in return for a $3,500 donation to a Brooklyn school for computers and internet access. McDonalds was lucky.

Sadly, Kathleen Creighton passed away just a few months after she registered ‘casey.com’, before she ever had an opportunity to make any use of it. There was no web site, no email addresses, just a WHOIS registration record with a contact name and email address to whom my inquires went unanswered. When I next sent my inquiry to the technical contact on the registration record, they informed me of Kathleen’s recent demise, and transferred the domain to me. I had just happened to be the next ‘Casey’ who was interested in staking the same digital claim that Kathleen had, and the domain became mine. Was I lucky? If so, it’s always come with the sad reminder that it came from somebody’s passing.

The oldest capture of casey.com by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine is from December 27, 1996. And it’s a picture of the landing page of the Internet provider I used at the time (Capital Area Internet Service). The next capture is almost two years later, on December 2, 1998, shows a full website, and it’s awesome! A photoshop filter accident as the main image, image mapped navigation (WITH alternate text links), an animated GIF fake traffic counter, and YES, that’s some Comic Sans! So when did casey.com launch on the World Wide Web? The clue is there under the the ‘last updated’ link in the upper left corner. Casey.com launched on January 24, 1998.

In the 20 years since, casey.com has evolved from a personal website, to a company site (during my self-employment phase when casey.com even sponsored my kids soccer teams), to a blog, and then to a neglected blog. Somewhere along the way social media diminished my necessity of having a personal website. Homesteading online has gotten simpler, and generic online tract housing now swamps the now old little houses on the digital prairie.

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Even better than a URL, has been having an @casey.com email address. My ‘Contacts’ application reveals how friends emails have changed over the years; @aol, @erols, @earthlink, @hotmail, @verizon, @gmail and so on as providers and their offerings come and go. It doesn’t suck having an email address that’s yours forever. One that rolls as easily as your name, because it’s your name. Sorry to all the other Chris Casey’s out there, but I’m chris@casey.com and have been for more than 20 years. More recently it was a thrill to give my new daughter-in-law her own casey.com email address.

A couple times each month, I receive inquiries not unlike my outreach to Kathleen Creighton those many years ago, asking if I’d be willing to sell casey.com. The short answer is “No, casey.com is not for sale”. A longer more honest answer is, “Everything has a price. If your offer means a life of wealth and leisure, I’m listening.”  Who knows? Plenty of domain names have sold for that much and more (though they tend to be nouns, not names). But that’s just a nice daydream. Deep down my real domain dream is that casey.com, my little slice of digital real estate, remains in my family for their use for many years to come.

In the updated (2000) version of his book, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Howard Rheingold (Master of his domain at rheingold.com) wrote about the passing of his friend and collaborator on The Well, Kathleen Creighton, aka ‘Casey’.

“The day the news of Casey’s death was announced, people started testifying online. Dozens of people revealed that their first welcoming email came from Casey, and that she had provided free, unpublicized technical support as they learned their way around the WELL. At her funeral, her family was surprised to find Casey’s family and face-to-face friends outnumbered by a factor of ten by all these people she had known “through the Internet”.

My day will come too. But there are all kinds of Caseys; first name Caseys, last name Caseys, nickname Caseys, businesses named Casey… and whether it’s my own family or someone else who becomes its new master, casey.com will carry on after me. Until that time, with gratitude to Kathleen, to Casey, my turn as Lord of the Virtual Manor that is casey.com continues.

Kramer: "I'm Out!"

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Goodbye Tree

Family, Guide to Life, Home

We lost a tree today. It’s actually been dead for some time now, but unlike dead people, dead trees often manage to stay standing for quite a long time. But today it came down with a chainsaw induced crash. I’m struck by some emotion over this (it’s not my first such nostalgic goodbye), it had to go, but it’s always been there.

We’ve lived in our home for 27 years, and the tree was here first. So that’s how long we were acquainted. It was a pine tree of some sort. I don’t know enough about trees to specify a particular sort of pine tree. But it had needles, and cones, and sap, and smelled like pine. That was good enough.

Years ago, we were visited by a young man who lived in our house before us during his childhood, his family was the original owners (we’re the third – did any of us really ‘own’ the home? – but I digress). This young man told me that for their first Christmas in this home, they had a live Christmas tree that they planted in the yard after the holidays. This was our pine tree. I wrote about it at the time.

Pine tree saw our three kids grow up, providing sturdy and evenly spaced limbs for young climbers, and plenty of sap to sticky them up to mark their efforts. Tree’s branches supported piñatas at birthday parties, and bird feeders that were quickly emptied by acrobatic squirrels. Tree’s shade was of a superior quality. Yet each year tree dispersed piles of brown needles which covered our roof, filled our rain gutters, and took out one hot tub pump after sneaking past the filters.

In tree’s shadow is a younger dogwood tree that I planted 12 years ago on an inspired arbor day. I wrote about it at the time. Dogwood has done well in Pine’s shadow, and will now enjoy much greater light, now that Pine’s not there to cast a shadow any longer. I’m glad that Dogwood will inherit the legacy of being the tree planted by one of this home’s rotating owners.

Pine tree fell victim to some sort of boring beetle (I’ve yet to ever meet an engaging beetle). Goodbye Tree. You will be missed, and remembered as your remains will be cremated in many driveway fires for years to come.

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Book Review: The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu

Books

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our HeadsThe Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a fascinating history of the industry, people, and tactics that relentlessly pursue your attention. The book covers the advances of this industry as it keeps pace with advancing technology, from propaganda posters, radio, movies, television, email, the web, and most recently on social media and to the ‘fourth screen’ the mobile devices that rarely leave our grip. It probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone that you are constantly being advertised to, but it’s still very eye opening to learn the history and evolution of the efforts to get inside your head, eye opening and unnerving.

I began reading this book the weekend before Thanksgiving. And on an unrelated whim, on Thanksgiving Eve, I decided I would focus on enjoying the company of having my kids home for the holiday, and take a ‘Facebook Fast’ for three days. I’m guilty of being pretty much addicted to Facebook, obsessively checking in, sharing another selfie, forwarding a ‘real’ news article, and liking and commenting on the sharing by others. The notion of opting out of Facebook for three days felt much like a drinker’s (which I am) going on the wagon for a few days, just to prove to themselves that they can. Well, I did, and it was find. I should have turned off the notifications from Facebook on my phone, which worked to suck me back in, but I resisted.

And being off of Facebook, helped allow me to more quickly tear through this engaging book, which coincidentally, in it’s final lines, advised doing exactly what I had done,

“If we desire a future that avoids the enslavement of the propaganda state as well as the narcosis of the consumer and celebrity culture, we must first acknowledge the preciousness of our attention and resolve not to part with it as cheaply or unthinkingly as we so often have. And then we must act, individually and collectively, to make our attention our own again, and so reclaim ownership of the very experience of living.”

My only wish for improvement would have been if the book had included a section of photos and illustrations. Frequently when reading, I couldn’t help but tear my attention from the deep reading I was enjoying in order to Google a wartime poster, or a person, or breakthrough advertising campaign in order to better know and appreciate what I was reading about. All things which should have been included in the book.

Despite that minor quibble, I recommend this book highly. And I expect that my successful experiment of a Facebook Fast is one that I’ll repeat. Not just to prove that I can. But to reclaim ownership of MY very experience of living.

View all my reviews

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The Clumsy Stormtrooper

Movies

Home again after a 40-day work trip abroad, my lovely wife took the day off for my first day back, to start a wonderful long weekend to reacquaint. And what did she suggest? “We should watch ALL of the Star Wars movies to be ready for the opening of the new one”! (My wife is awesome). I’m no fanatic, but I know my Star Wars pretty well. I know that Han shot first. I’ve heard the Wilhelm Scream in there. I’ve had lengthy debates with friends about whether Luke ever returned to Dagobah to complete his Jedi training after ‘The Empire Strikes Back’. I’ve even followed recent debates about whether the destruction of Alderaan was justified. I can still quote lines from the original like it’s memorized, and I often do. So, not a fanatic, but still I think, Star Wars savvy.

So tonight we mix our drinks, make our popcorn, and settle in to watch the original Star Wars, Episode IV, A New Hope. We addressed the question of the proper order (release order, sequence order) and she doesn’t know it yet, but I think we’ll try the Machete order, but I digress.

The point is, I’ve seen this movie about a thousand times, but there’s always something new. Tonight, I think for the first time, I spotted this; while Han, Chewie and Luke are off on the Death Star detention level, stuck in a trash compactor, C-3PO and R2-D2 are barricaded in a control room that Stormtroopers are breaking into. Watch closely the Stormtrooper on the right, as they enter the control room.

Wow! How did I miss that before? Curious, I turn to Google, and not surprisingly, I find I’m about the last one to notice. The YouTube video I’ve embedded here has been viewed almost five million times. And this article in the Star Wars Wookiepedia explains the history of the head bump, and reveals that George Lucas added a sound effect in the 2004 DVD release to actually point out the gaffe, and I guess to remind us that Stormtroopers are human too.

Anyway, we’re looking forward to the next installment that we hope to catch over the holidays, and we hope to hear a Wilhelm Scream and to see a good head bump or two.

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Tell Chris to Walk the Dog!

Technology

Hey Friends,

I’m playing around with some online advocacy tools and I created this petition as an experiment. If you’re reading this, help me out and sign the petition.

Thanks!

Chris (and yes, I’ll walk the dog, I promise)

—

UPDATE: I walked the dog.

wrigley_walk

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Goodbye Family Minivan

Guide to Life, Home

I don’t care much about cars. I’m definitely not anything at all what you would call a ‘car guy’. My requirements for a car, as Steve Martin so succinctly put it, “Four fucking wheels and a seat!”. But we just sold our car, and the truth is, I’m feeling pretty sentimental about it.

We purchased our 2001 Honda Odyssey used way back when it had about 20,000 miles on it, and we just sold it with 208,074 miles. And among those miles in between, we raised our family it it. Local miles to school and soccer games, family trips to the Outer Banks, and home to Illinois. It drove us through big cities, and it delivered us to campgrounds. Our kids learned to drive it, and it sat loyally in the driveway every winter, posing for the obligatory buried in snow photos without complaint.

But as we empty our nest, and downsize our belongings, we no longer need an old minivan. We considered many options; shooting it (don’t own a gun), living in it (down by the river), abandoning it (probably traceable DNA to be found on lost french fries and cheerios on the floor), or selling it. I’m very happy that we found a buyer, a family with five kids, and dad’s a mechanic. They live close buy, so it’s gonna be kinda weird seeing our minivan on the road sometimes. But it will be nice to know, it’s found a new family to serve.

Here’s a few photos from over the years:

A Driving Odessey

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Boardwalk Empire at the National Archives

Books, Television

So a few months back, talking TV shows over a few beers, my buddy TJ recommended the HBO Series ‘Boardwalk Empire’ to me. I had a vague notion it was a period gangster type of thing, and having recently read a few good books about the prohibition era, TJ’s endorsement pushed me over the edge to check it out. Because who doesn’t have time for another TV show in their life? Fortunately, modern life means missing a show doesn’t mean missing it forever, or even waiting for reruns. We can consume our TV on demand. And so I’ve been binging on Boardwalk Empire lately. No one else in the family is watching it, so it’s either late night solo shows, or commuter episodes snuck in on my iPhone on the bus (thank you grandfathered unlimited data plan!).

Anyway, I’m halfway through season 4 of the 5 season show and really loving it, when I got an email from the National Archives about a free ‘behind the scenes’ discussion with the author of the book that inspired the series, the writer who developed it for HBO, two actors from the show, and the visual effects supervisor from the show. It was a very interesting and entertaining event, and much to the Archives credit, the whole thing was live on YouTube and remains there now. If you’re a fan of the show, you’ll really enjoy watching this. But you had to be there to get a signed copy of the book 🙂

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Rep. Traficant’s Bangin’ GIF

Politics, Technology

Rep. Traficant - Bangin' Away in DCWay  back in May 2001, I spoke at a forum hosted by American University on the topic of Congress on the Internet. For my remarks, I humbly submitted my suggesgtion for what I believed to have been the  Top Ten Milestones for Congress on the Internet up to that point.

And #4 on my list was “Animations Abound: Waving flags, flying letters, & Rep. Traficant ‘Bangin’ Away’”. The Traficant reference came from this blurb I wrote in a March 1997 online update to my book, The Hill on the Net. Here’s what I wrote;

THE ANIMATED REPRESENTATIVE
I wondered who would do it first. Which member of Congress would go beyond the standard official portrait on their home page and use animation to show themselves in action; smiling widely, giving a thumbs up, or offering a virtual handshake. I guess it should come as no surprise that a member who is well known for his animated floor speeches would not be happy with a gif that sat still. Representative James Traficant of Ohio has the first animated photo that I’ve seen on a member of Congress’ home page, and it’s a hoot.

The animation, shown at right, shows Rep. Traficant wielding a piece of 2×4, like a batter warming up to swing. On the board is his motto, “Bangin’ Away in DC’. He was well known for his outrageous one-minute speeches, which often included his appeal to ‘beam me up’. He was also well known for his uniquely difficult to describe hairstyle. (You can find some of his finest moments here and here).

Traficant was expelled from Congress in 2002, only the second member of Congress to suffer that fate since the Civil War, following his conviction for accepting bribes, making congressional staff work on his farm and boat, witness tampering, destroying evidence, and filing false tax returns. He served seven years in prison for these crimes. He died yesterday following a tractor accident on his Ohio farm.

Rest in Peace Rep. Traficant, and a hat tip to whomever it was on your staff that created that bangin’ animated GIF when they weren’t cleaning your boat.

Dancing Janet RenoIt was in 2002, when I was working on Janet Reno’s gubernatorial campaign, that I produced my most memorable political animated GIF (and for the record, count me in the ‘Hard G Pronunciation’ camp). The campaign had smartly embraced the SNL spoof of Reno, a bit titled ‘Janet Reno’s Dance Party’. The Reno campaign hosted fundraisers under the same name, and agreed to my suggestion that we animate a dancing Janet for our website’s promotion of the events. Somehow, it seems to me anyway, that my jerky attempt at animation mimicked well how most might imagine Janet Reno awkwardly dancing. (Coincidentally, Traficant was no Reno fan, having once belittled her as “a good prospect to run for governor of Beijing“)

And another hat tip the humble animated GIF, which fell out of use, but is now enjoying a wonderful resurgence. If you’re interested in learning more, this history from PBS titled Animated GIFs: The Birth of a Medium is well worth the seven minutes. Enjoy!

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