little bits of everything

Not really worth waiting for:
5/1/2000 A New start
A new chance to put a message in. Doesn't make sense to me either. Come back in February for the next exciting instalment.

Back in 1999 it mostly cost money to run a blog (from what I can remember). You had to sort out your own hosting. Then Dave Winer made on offer on his blogging platform editthispage.com for a 60 day free trial, so I was away. So what was my very first post? What words did I choose to post for all on the internet to see?
 23 December 1999 I'm stil trying to decide what to do with this. Click on the skull to add your suggestion. Oh, that's not very good is it. A typo in the second word too. The URL was morrissfamily.editthispage.com. (I think. Everything I say could be unreliable, because it was a while ago.) I also created an FAQ page that day:

Who are the Morriss family? We are just a normal family with a dad who likes exploring the internet.Why don't you have more information? Because I'm not sure want I want to do with this site. I think there are no typos there. The idea was that I would share family news. Come back in January to see what my next post was.

As of 23/12/1999 I will have been blogging for 20 years. I plan to do a retrospective on my first few blog posts starting on 23/12/2019, but before I was writing them I was reading blogs.

Here are the notable ones from those early days.
scripting.com I used to read this at work while I was dialing up to download our work email because as it was about scripting, which is work, isn't it? I stopped reading it a few years ago, but Dave Winer is still going.
Through Dave I found... Tim Bray - Ongoing And I have been reading him ever since. He writes engagingly about technology, boats, his electric car and toast. When I see that red diamond in my feedreader I will often read that first. Magdelena Donea As her Twitter bio says, "Once famous on the internet". I first came across her website (probably called a webzine in those days) from a link on the Microsoft homepage( or maybe it was the Internet Explorer homepage). Even the internet archive doesn't have that site (kia.net/~m…

I have a post brewing in my head called "I don't love your thing, but I love that you love your thing", about SF/F and media fandom and how I stand on the edges watching what people do, which would end with an "except". This is the except.

I was reading a review of Sherwood by Meagan Spooner and I thought I'd get on and tell you about Robin Hood. In particular I loved Robin of Sherwood on ITV in the 1980s. Thirteen years ago I posted about how I was looking forward to the BBC's (then) new series of Robin Hood. Whilst that programme was really good, and something we all enjoyed as a family, Robin of Sherwood was better in my mind.

It had an atmospheric soundtrack by Clannad (so I bought the album). As well as the usual story of a good outlaw it also had elements of pagan spirituality as the character of Herne the Hunter helps out somehow (my memory of actual plotlines is pretty faint). On those olden days (the 1980s, not the middle ages) there was no way…

(I wrote this five years ago, but for some reason I never published it. A couple of weeks ago our washing machine got a whole new motor. I think when the history of our washing machine is written people will need this information, so I'm publishing this post.)

I wrote about a new development in washing machines on my other blog. I tweeted about it and Berg favourited my tweet. They also linked to a blog post by Rachel Coldicutt Domestic Folklore, or washing machines for men which talked about Berg's work. As we're veering away from technology and towards the personal I'm putting my thoughts about Rachel's post on this blog.

First of all, an update on our washing machine itself, as you're probably concerned about its welfare given my update at the end of my previous post. It's OK. The problem was that the motor brushes had worn out. Because it's a fancy electronic machine the repair man was able to put it into diagnostic mode and get a code out which sai…

While 2018 is not quite over, I think we've had enough of the year that I can announce my personal awards. Starting with...
Best TV series based on a number of short SF stories Electric Dreams This was a real treat. A number of Philip K Dick's short stories were turned into hour long TV programmes. This doesn't happen often, maybe because it's expensive to create one-off sets and do casting for anything less than a complete series, but kudos to Sony for doing that with this series. Philip K Dick wrote the stories that the films Minority Report and Total Recall are based on, so you can guess what sort of subjects are covered. Some are set in the future, or on other planets, while others are set around now. Given that they were written decades ago some are very prescient. 
The title sequence for this series also deserves an Honourable Mention for the next award: Best TV title sequence Lucky Man The third series of Lucky Man came out this year on ITV. Although titled Stan…