I splice this in here. This is my statement on which data I may or may not collect when you land on my World-Wide Web pages. If you click on the globe logo at this page's foot, you can view all the data you send me. I do not do anything with it. I request it because I find statistics fascinating.
After around twenty-three years of having my World-Wide Web
pages hosted on whatever Internet Service Provider (ISP) which I
was connecting to the Internet, I splurged and
obtained a domain name. It is a portmanteau of my corporation,
which has been registered since 1987,
It is hosted on an HTTPS | TLS server
in Iceland.
I have a “privacy policy”. It is really quite simple to understand. But it is limited due to larger Internet corporations unilaterally deciding they will not agree to it.
For years, I have utilized SpamGourmet as my E-Mail “proxy”. It is a valuable service. It cuts down the amount of spam which is directed at you and me by ‘eating’ the spam E-Mail originating from somebody not on your approved list. {The spammer gets one E-Mail through, at which point you condemn him.} If you look at the source code of this W-WW page, you should notice an E-Mail address near the end. The domain name is "xoxy.net".
If you want to interact with me, I insist you accept
that [e.g.] "WhatiSay.pudgym29 [at] xoxy.net" is a
valid e-mail address.
If you cannot get through that, and
want to persist that an e-mail address not provided by Gmail, Hotmail,
Outlook, Yahoo, or Comcast (or another cable television provider) is
something you will not contemplate as valid; you do not get to
interact with me.
I am slowly going through my memory in order to give you the
comprehensive tale of my life. It will be posted here, perhaps
on this page.
It is not complete, but I perceive you
might be interested in what I have compiled so far.
To read it, click here.
I shall comment on the National Security Agency - PRISM
spying program. I am glad more people have finally learned
about this scheme. It still is not a partisan issue.
The Electronic
Frontier Foundation has posted this timeline of how and when it
was implemented. [If you didn't click through, it began in
2005, under guess whose administration.]
Spying on everybody's telephone calls, E-Mail messages,
and World-Wide Web surfing is wrong. A basic tenet of
American jurisprudence has been catastrophically flopped!
What else should you do? I will remind you that I am on the side of privacy and anonymity, which is what all these spying programs want to take away from you. You can hang on to this. But it takes diligent work; which seemingly a lot of you do not want to enact.
Educating on-line denizens who want to maintain a level of
on-line privacy is an activity engaged in for scores of
legitimate reasons. To herd them into the camp with the
less than ½ of 1% who misuse this knowledge
is a gross insult.
The judicious use of W-WW based
E-Mail (such as VFEmail),
along with configuration in your browser of
an anonymous proxy
from a country other than the U.S.A., Canada, the U.K., a
member state of the European Union, or the usage of Tor,
disabling JavaScript|ActiveX® in that browser, utilizing a
Virtual Privacy Network, and | or using NoScript as much as
possible, can enable you to maintain much of your on-line
privacy.
It is work. It is harder since Firefox
occluded the method to let you disable JavaScript|ActiveX®.
(You will have to poke into "about:config". Firefox
will squeal when you do this. The browser variables you need to
toggle to false are javascript.enabled, and
pref.advanced.javascript.disable_button.advanced.)
The 1987 Chevrolet Sprint is back in the garage here. It has performed well. I just do not drive it all that much. I would rather ride transit whenever possible, including when shopping at grocers or liquor stores. A key portion of my hesitancy was due to not having a spare tire if any of them was to be damaged. No one in North America offered a P145/80R-12 tire. In January 2020, I managed to find a Japanese proxy buying service which would buy the tire in Japan and ship here. The tires arrived and were installed on 28 February 2020.
While hardly anybody noticed; an anniversary passed. March 2023
demarcated my twenty-seventh year on the Internet and the
World-Wide Web.
I believe I have never notated just how I
(& dad, for that matter) got out here back in March 1996. I'll
do that now.
The story goes back to 1993. Do recall that I had begun sending
my articles for David Vowell's {& Soccer Solidarity's}
monthly "Inside Soccer" zine via a Commodore 64 Color
BBS network. There were network nodes near both Chicago &
Baltimore. As you might have read, in February 1994, I gave money to
the System Operator of the Smoking Mirror Bulletin Board
System [BBS]. It was being hosted on a Commodore Amiga computer. The
SysOp met me (& a bunch of other Smoking Mirror BBS users) at
Connie's Pizza in Bridgeport one February Saturday afternoon. He told
me, "Since I do not have a lot of content for 8-bit Commodore
users, I have set up an E-Mail account for you so you can go to Usenet
and access comp.sys.cbm." {I hear you out there. I did
not utter, "What is E-Mail? What is Usenet?"}
In
June, a now-defunct magazine aimed at beer homebrewers, titled
"Brewing Techniques", ran an article on what was then
available on the Internet for homebrewers. The key paragraph though,
was when it mentioned how to get to the Internet if you did not have
access to the Internet. It turned out that there was a World-Wide Web
site which kept track of Internet Service Providers.(!) It had a
domain name of "thelist.com".
In Chicago (in 1994-95), not every Chicago Public Library branch had Internet access. I think it was limited to the main one downtown, and the regional branch libraries. But this was a fairly high point for America on-Line, and amidst all its own content, semi-occluded, was a portal to the Internet. Thelist.com was one of the few W-WW sites it let you reach. My father had an account on AoL. Seemingly, he was intrigued by what else was out here. So he put me in charge of investigating other ISPs beyond AoL. But I should inform you that in 1994, there was no such thing as unlimited hours. Each AoL account was allocated a specific number of hours. If you ran over, you were disconnected and you couldn't get back on-line until the start of the next month.
Note the context of the time span. By then, I was getting deeper and deeper into the machinations of the Chicago POWER indoor soccer team. It was getting more of my effort than finding another way to the Internet. It took being extruded from the POWER franchise in October 1995 to repurpose the ISP search to a more prominent slot. {As you may know, I was readmitted to the core by mid-December 1995, ostensibly due to the rumor that the franchise was about to be sold to a solitary businessman.}
In late January 1996, I told dad I wanted to use his computer to
look for an ISP. (While I was still using my Commodore 64, it could
only reach the other BBS'. It was not well suited for reaching the
Internet, including landing on Usenet [I had learned there was a
Usenet group which also had information about ISPs.].) Thelist.com had
options which let you look for ISPs with Points of Presence (POPs) in
your local telephone calling area.
This was something of which
I had an advantage. I had the Ameritech print list of which telephone
prefices it considered to be in my “A” (< 8 miles -
untimed calls), “B” (8-15 miles - charged by the minute),
“C” (16-23 miles - local toll calls), & “D”
(24+ miles, local toll calls) calling zones. I could search for ISPs
in not just area code 312, but 708, 847, and the soon-to-be split-off
773 area code.
I had two underlying precepts to which I was determined to adhere.
I did not want to pay a ‘setup’ fee, and I wanted an ISP
domained in ".net". If I recall this correctly, I found
eight potential ISPs for us. The comparison amongst them
whittled them down to the eventual champion: Netwave.net.
As it happened, this was a superb choice for us. Netwave.net
offered each account allocated so-many MBs of server space for the
monthly fee, and it was a tolerant ISP as to what it would allow you
to store on your server space.
I did not put up the Chicago
POWER memorial archive until 1998. When I did, I discovered there was
a Netwave webring. I signed on for that. Then, I learned that one of
the other sites on the Netwave webring was somebody's pictures of
activities at Nudes-A-Poppin' expositions in Indiana. Wow.
(The Internet Archive's ‘Wayback
Machine’ can unearth many of these primordial W-WW pages,
but probably none of the pictures. Type "netwave.net" into
the search box.)
Getting on the World-Wide Web paid off swiftly. A POWER home game
(v. Kansas City ATTACK) had been sold to a promoter in Montreal,
Quebec, Canada. It was to occur at the Verdun Auditorium on Sunday,
10 March 1996. I managed to find key travel and transit W-WW sites
showing where was the Verdun Auditorium, the transit route to Dorval
Airport, and how to manuever the Montreal underground walkways.
[As for the game: We fell behind 8-nil; came all the way back
{with people in the stands rooting for us!} to level at 8-8 {&
recollect that all our “good” players had been traded away
on Tuesday}; and then the ATTACK got a 2-point and a 3-point goal {v.
our 6th attacker} to win 13-8.] (I had to complete the official
N.P.S.L. scoresheet, without any assistance from Jim Egan.) But what
I most distinctly remember is the amazed look on players' faces
when, without anything but the name and address of the restaurant
where the post-game meal was being served, I turned up as they were
being served. (Yes, I was served.) (I had a passable street map and
the transit map. I just did not get a ride with them then.)
Undoubtedly, the high point of getting out here on the Internet in 1996 was being able to vote on the official promulgation of rec.arts.movies.erotica. Look at the tabulation of the votes and espy my "YES" cry.
We lasted on Netwave until September 2001. I did have us signed up with another ISP on the 1st. But I thought I had lost my Chicago POWER pages when Netwave faded away. It was only when Leo Laporte tipped me off to the ‘Wayback Machine’ on an episode of ZDTV's "The Screen Savers" that I rediscovered them.
I think that pretty much tells you how it began. If you have any more questions about this, contact me. There is an E-Mail address buried in the source code of this page.
My father, Peter, passed away ay 7:53 am on Wednesday, 14 October
2015. It was an acute myocardial infarction (a|k|a: a heart
attack).
On Saturday, the 10th, he was not feeling well.
He had me rub vaporing salve on his chest & back. But he
ultimately asked me to drive him to the hospital.
I
tweeted this.
I drove the 1987 Chevrolet Sprint. No incidents
with either the car, or him. We got there. We entered via the
professional building. I parked the Sprint in the covered garage. Dad
found a wheelchair and sat in it.
I rolled us over to
Outpatient Services. A clerk there told us to go to the Emergency
Room. Down an elevator, and through an outward opening door, we were in
the E.R. We were assigned room #8. An E.R. nurse had a handful of forms
to be signed. She remarked that I could sign them if he was not feeling
sufficient, but Dad signed all of them. A little later, he
complained about pain transmitting from his back to his chest. He told
me to go get a doctor to inspect him. I walked around the E.R., and
found an E.R. physician. He inspected dad. He left the room. Another
doctor entered the room and inspected him. He left the room. A third
doctor entered the room and inspected him. Adverse events seemingly
began occurring.
A nurse came in with a crash cart.
IVs were begun on dad's right arm. A computer monitor in room #8 began
logging what was being injected into dad's body. I was sitting in a chair
two feet away from his left arm, and my jaw began dropping.
When everybody who had hooked up an IV tube to dad had exited room
#8, I walked up for a closer glance at the computer monitor. Amongst
other drug compounds known chiefly by doctors & nurses, dad was
administered something with which I was familiar: Morphine, and
nitroglycerin! He had had a slight heart attack.
In the span of about three hours, dad had gone from conscious and
responsive, to sedated and on a respirator.
I contacted relatives
and friends on Sunday morning, because when I got back to the domicile
here, it was quite late on Saturday night, and I did not want to make
their night restless.
I stayed at home on Sunday to answer the
incoming calls. On Monday, when I went to the intensive care unit
at Resurrection Hosp., he had rebounded to the extent that he asked me
to bring his teeth the next time.
Sorrowfully, when I visited Resurrection on Tuesday {I had not
intended to visit on Tuesday, but an I.C.U. nurse telephoned here and
asked for my presence to sign a consent form for a heart operation for
Wednesday morning.}, I walked close to his bed, and showed him his
teeth, and said, "Here are your teeth."
I did not
receive a coherent reply.
I signed the consent form for the
operation.
Gauging that the operation would occur on Wednesday morning, I
would opt to not visit Resurrection because he would not be in
condition to have any semblance of a conversation.
But I
received another telephone call from Resurrection on Wednesday
morning at 8:15 am. It wanted me to go there because it had an
important announcement for me.
I figured this was the
enervation decision. As I had a hasty breakfast {I am seldom
awake at 8:15 am.},
I
tweeted this, and
this,
and finally
this.
If you seek the speech I made at dad's post-funeral banquet, it is here.
Google™ (or StartPage™ or DuckDuckGo™) finds
my pages. Use it.
There is nothing I can do
about genuine spammers who put a link to these pages on their
genuinely spammy pages. (They are generally trying to sell
knock-off pharmaceuticals. They believe that by linking to a
huge number of W-WW pages, those pages' webmasters | janitors
will reciprocally link back to them.) But their actions should
not cause my URLs, or my URL shorteners, to disappear from any
search engine.
It is time to toss out all the former verbiage on this
W-WW page and put up the data which is more relevant to me,
and to you.
I have interests in my life which span the
arc from widely-held and desirable to deplorable and
infernal. This is me. If anybody has a contention with
this, you do not need to have anything to do with me, and I
shall strive to avoid having any semblance of an association
with you.
But for some people, this laissez-faire precept is insufficient in their sad and sorry lives. They feel a compulsion to role-play a “higher creature” while on Earth.
This caused me to change a frequently-used E-Mail address' signature to:
“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things.
But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” - Steven Weinberg
Frankly, these humans have been so conjured by religion, they have lost the ability to cohesively comprehend logic. If somehow, one of them lands on this W-WW page, I shall be as explicit as I can:
If you kill me, you shall not go to heaven,
or whatever is the name of your desired afterlife venue.
Those besides you who tell you it is permitted to kill me
also shall not go to heaven.
After those interruptions, I shall go back to a more general description of what is occurring in my life.
Somewhere along the way, I picked up the travel bug. This was
not inherited from either mom or dad. I will attribute this to my
Uncle Willy [R.I.P. January 2014], who worked for the Chicago
Transit Authority. [But he actually was initially hired as a
bus driver by the Chicago Motor Coach Company, four
months before it was bought by the CTA.] They were not the traveling
type, even though dad worked for the Chicago & North Western
Railway. (Dad's supplemental income checks were from the Railroad
Retirement Board, a Federal agency created before the Social
Security Administration.)
I matriculated at the Univ.
of Illinois - Chicago {Circle}, so I never left the area for
that. The only other spot in the entire U.S.A. with which I had
some familiarity was southern California, thanks to trips there
in 1978 & 1979 with close cousins [& sons of Uncle Willy]
Jerry [now lives in Park Ridge, IL.] and Ron [now lives in Corona
Del Mar, CA.].
I passed a driving exam in Illinois in 1974,
but after one year, I didn't renew my driver's license because I
did not have an auto, and was more interested saving money for
buying records by riding transit.
It took relocating to
southern California in February 1981 to inject the quest to
realize other cultures into my bloodstream.
Mom had her first stroke in September 2008.
We did not know it was a stroke at that time. That Friday was
one of the wettest in Chicago weather history. When she went out
to the garage to feed the alley cats, we thought she was staying
in it until the rain let up. When I went out into it and found
her lying on the ground between the two autos parked therein [I
had to go get dad because I couldn't pick her up by myself.],
our prognosis was she had fallen and concussed herself against
an auto, or on the concrete floor. But during one night of
twitching and almost falling out of bed, 9-1-1 was called. She
was brought to Resurrection Hospital at Central Ave. &
Addison St. It was there we learned she had had a stroke.
If you explore the
Internet Archive's Wayback Machine [my ISP username was
"pudgym30a"], you should find versions of these
index.html pages annotating what was occurring
contemporaneously.
We hired a home nurse for her [10
hours a day, 6 days a week]. Dad was seeing doctors at the big
Resurrection Medical Center on W. Talcott Ave. On Thursday, 6
August 2009, while dad and I were at one of his
regularly-scheduled doctor appointments, mom had another
stroke. When we arrived back at the domicile {We had bought
dinner for her.}, the nurse told us she threw up and was
sitting catatonically on the couch thereafter. A Chicago Fire
Dept. ambulance was again called. She was brought to ‘small
Res’ at Addison St. & Central Ave. [Presence has since
sold it off.] where the prognosis was terminal. We opted to
enervate. She passed away on Friday, 7 August 2009 at 8:30 pm,
with eight people in attendance.
I believe that paragraph should answer the affiliated question of "What happened to your mother?". Let me utter one more time that I loved mom too. But there was definitely a constrained relationship between her and I, compounded significantly by our bedrooms being only 15 feet apart. If you want more details as to what that encompassed, you can ask me in person when and if you meet me (& if you are not one of those ‘religious’ types whom I decry above, you should).
While I am discussing other family members' health [or the lack thereof], let me tell you about mine. In a trait I highly suspect was ingrained from mom's side [she was distrustful of doctors and medicine], I never actually had a health plan. If something critical arose, I would go to a walk-in clinic like Physicians ImmediateCare® and have somebody there prescribe something for it. The prescription I currently carry is a Prasco Laboratories HFA 90 mcg inhaler - this is in case I get a less-acute asthma attack. It is a situational inhaler. With the passage of the Affordable Care Act, things had to change. They have. On the good side, I could no longer be denied coverage for bronchial asthma due to a prior history of it.
I am down to just "Mirko" inside here now.
Mirko is a cute, female, black & beige mottled cat.
She has outlived both mom and dad here. (She came inside in
December 2008. I figure she was a half-year old.) I haven't
learned of or viewed any soccer teams with black & beige
colors; so I opted to name her after the player who scored our
Championship-Winning-Goal on 25 April 1991:
Mirko
Castillo. Mirko Castillo was brought back to Chicago one
evening in January 2011 when that season's indoor soccer franchise
[the Chicago RIOT] had "Chicago indoor soccer heritage
night". He learned (and glimpsed a picture thereof) about the
cat named after him.
Mirko has been neutered (by the
Anti-Cruelty
Society via its “trap, neuter, & return”
program).
When I am away from here, I hire a cat sitter.
I have to be a little more subtle talking about future trips.
Because when I am not here, there is nobody here except Mirko, and
she is not an attack cat.
The abode is in urgent need of a
thorough cleaning. I need a recycling dumpster and perhaps 4 - 8
people to help me toss all this junk, and move the remnant furniture.
Dad's clothes will eventually go to the Brown Elephant Resale
Shop in Chicago. Of more concern is all the canned foodstuffs
which, for the most part, were purchased prior to September 2008.
I never learned how to cook. But it bristles me to think that food
should be trashed, even if it is this old.
I will halt with my introduction here. If you wish to know more about me (to which I am willing to admit), you can click here. Otherwise, note that I am now registered on Mastodon.
Here are other World-Wide Web pages I maintain =