gemini://smellsbad.com/gemlog/IntroAndAbout.gmi

Hello! My name is Jeff and I'm currently based in Detroit, MI. I'm a musician, recording under the name "Even Beams" and I run a small furniture store with my family. Before my furniture vocation, I was a system administrator for 15 years. I got burned out, but I've recently been getting back into tech, this time as a hobby. I'll also be writing about music and art as well as whatever else strikes my fancy. My friend once said my hobby is collecting hobbies, so I tend to drift from interest to interest. Music has been the one constant though, so that'll always be a topic.

I've been wanting to write a blog again but not really sure how to go about it. I've been really into the smallweb the last few years, and I've considdered publishing on maybe a tilde style site or something like that. I discovered Gemini awhile ago, and I tried to install a server on my VPS but I couldn't get it working and gave up. Well I finally tried again so here I am.

Gemini reminds me a lot of my early experiences with the Internet and BBSes. I got my first modem in 1996, but didn't get the Internet right away. I remember going to the library and searching a book in the intra-library loan system. I saw the library software dial up a phone number and log in with an ID. I wrote the number and login down and rushed home to dial it up myself in a terminal. My first attempt at "hacking" was a wild success - the password was "library".

I now had access to the library system which was just a little bit exciting at first. I renewed some of my books and placed holds on others. Something that is so simple nowadays was pretty cool back then - renewing a book online was amazing! Of course the novelty of that wore off in about 60 seconds, and I started poking around the system more seeing what I could do and what I could access. I got into the copyright section of the software, and found I could click on the name of the company who built the software... to my astonishment it opened up Lynx and took me to their website. I followed every link I could, trying to get somewhere cool. I eventually was able to get to Yahoo.com, a process that I memorized and took clicking through about 9 links.

My world had opened up. My first exposure to the Internet was purely through the text based browser Lynx and it was glorious.

I've always been chasing that cozy feeling of bumming around the net with just text on a black background. In my office job days I would SSH into a shell and surf the Internet via elinks to get around firewalls. I still keep an SSH shell open and sit on IRC all day even though not much happens anymore.

P.S. The domain smellsbad.com is one I bought for irc. Back in the day when irc and irc shells were big, shells would offer domains so your hostname would look like jeff.is@a.h4x0r.ca or something dumb. I bought this so I'd show up as jeff@smellsbad.com, which was surprisingly not registered.