Time Traveling to the BoilerRoom

Every Wednesday, our boss takes us out to lunch. Like all geeks do, we started talking about some pretty fanciful topics, including Time Travel.

Ignoring the laws of physics (and the bewildered stares of the young ladies at the next table), we developed complex strategies of how we would use time travel to peek into alternate futures. (Think “Quantum Leap” with a touch of “Doctor Who”). Anyway, that got me reminiscing about my own internet past. 

Prior to registering this domain (several years ago, now) I maintained a website on a server hosted by my ISP. I can still remember the sounds of my modem syncing with the modems at TheSocket.

In case you didn’t know, there’s a cool service provided by WaybackMachine.org that archives websites from long ago.

So I looked up a site that I maintained dedicated to professional wrestling. That’s right, the WWF (now the WWE). There I had some interesting stuff, including a page that llowed you to Rate your Favorite Wrestler and a page where you could write a Love Letter to Chyna. These pages were a lot of simple HTML (mostly)

Maintaining this site took a couple of hours every week. Especially the Love Letters to Chyna page. Chyna (real name Joanie Laurer) had a lot fans, back in the day. I received several love letters for her every single day. The best ones, I made it to the site. Of course, it took a bit of work to get them on the site. The letters came in as an email, which I had to parse, edit, convert to HTML and then post to the site. A lot of work, but it was well worth it.

I always wondered if she ever stopped by to read the letters.

Sometimes I wonder just how much better that site could have been had I had a blog engine like the one I use now; or how much easier the Love Letters to Chyna page would have been to maintain had I had access to a simple database for storing those love letters. But all that contributed to my being here, now. So I guess that in the end it was all for the best.