Archive

Short Notes

   I'm not entirely sure what happened, but one of my favorite bloggers has changed her URL on us, Miss melly has moved to Ordinary Morning. Go have a look, we all love her!

   Just in case you are wondering, the note below to my high school still has not been answered. Some weird combination of guilt and nostalgia is still welling up inside me over this. All of your support has been appriciated.

   There is a new feature here on IWDC. I have long been a bonsai enthusiast. So, I began an experiment at work to grow my little trees indoors. I started an almost blog like page on my personal webspace to chonicle this new hobby. But, I'm about to lose that space so I thought I'd add it to the features here. I hope you enjoy my Notebook!

   No one has yet come forward to claim our prizes for being our 1000th visitor. I'm not sure if they were more embarassed that we caught them reading our site or that we caught them using IE 4.0! Either way, one of my planned gifts was to be a set of stickers. I still want to give out the yet undesigned stickers. So, if you would like a set our our IWDC stickers, just send me a snail-mail address - here. We won't use the address for anything else but this - I promise. We only ask that you make sure that these stickers are placed where others will see them - high profile areas. Now we would never condone vandalism - we like to think of it as random acts of art!

Posted by: Jericho - 04/26/02 - 4:35 pm -

Angry Sinner, Reformed

   About a week and a half ago I had an attack of nearly fatal nostalgia. The e-mail below was sent as the attack happened. It's self explainatory.

From: Jericho Brown - jericho@yeahright.com
To: stjohns@stjohnshigh.com
Date: Saturday, April 13, 2002 1:34 AM
Subject: Wow

   Okay, I never thought I'd be doing anything like this. But you have to grow up someday.

   I just walked through my kitchen and on my table was something that caught my eye: a plain black and white "zine" style newsletter with a Lion on it. I don't know why I picked it up.

   On the front it said in plain bold letters "The Lion's Roar". Ah yes, I remembered, someone called my wife the other day and got our address. A letter had already come through. So, I stood there thinking, they found me and they aren't letting go - hmm, I wonder what newsletter wizard they used to pull this thing together?

   I flipped to through the first pages, pictures of priests and students. Boring, I thought, the students didn't look much different from ones that were there ten years ago. Page four caught my eye, the word that stood out was "Anger" - the grade school principal's name is Anger? That's priceless! The next page held a familiar face - Mrs. Brady. What I read next shocked me and caused me to utter a few explicatives:

Principal?

   Sandy Brady was principal of the high school? Wow, a lot has changed! I pushed into the letter, more students and priests, begging for cash, old people, or, should I say "Alumni?" A list of Alumni with what they are doing now. Only one student listed from a class after '81, Carol Robertson Bathon, '87 (I just looked her up in my year book - I don't remember her - I was after all only a "frosh" in '87.) No one even mentioned that I remember. How sad. Our group never did have much school spirit!
   Below this list on page 13 (funny!) was the thing that made me write this email. There was a picture of yet another member of the clergy - but not a priest. I recognized Mrs. Anger to the right of the Bishop, but the person on the left mystified me for a second. I read the caption and again I uttered some familiar words! Obviously the picture up front was one from much closer to when I was a student - because that's how I remember Mrs. Brady to look. She stopped coloring her hair and, like the rest of us, had added a few pounds. But, that was one of my favorite faces from my high school years.

   I don't know who's reading this, but I want to level with you on a few points - call it confession.
   In 1990 I left SJH, I left the Church and it was my first step in a five year journey to leave St. Louis. I was an angry young man. I thought I hated St. Johns, but I later discovered that I didn't hate the school - I rather liked the school. I hated one man. Not because he was an authority figure, as I thought for a while, and not because he ever did anything to me that I didn't get the chance to pay him back for - no, I hated George Wingbermuehle because he was a petty tyrant who lorded it up over people who couldn't fight back. Under the reign of George the Terrible, I saw good students humiliated for no good reason, I saw good teachers alienated, pushed out and humiliated for no reason I could see and I saw good ideas killed because they hadn't come from the one air conditioned room in the entire *explicative* place!

   But, obviously, that was quite some time ago.

   When I left the school I vowed I would never do anything for the school. Alumni contributions? No chance! I worked my way through high school, my freshman year I worked as a janitor in the school and most of my pay went to my tuition. My junior year, I gave up the chance for a principal role in the Spring Musical so that I could get a few more hours at work to pay my tuition. The summer after my junior year, Sandy Brady helped me land a job that helped me pay my tuition. I had done my time and any place that would employ someone like George didn't deserve my money.

   Um, yeah, a little angry!

   I left the Church, too. I've had trouble accepting the Church and organized religion as a whole pretty much since 7th grade. However, I was an altar boy in grade school, quite often I went to church six days a week - plus a couple of times on Sunday. In that time I went to more funerals than the average retiree. Throughout high school I rarely if ever went on Sunday or holidays and I often told my confessor, during school functions, that I lacked faith and had nothing to confess. But, even so, I regularly participated in Mass, often read aloud and got ridiculed for it my entire high school career. At age eight-teen, I determined that was enough. I realize that whom ever is reading this probably holds their faith dearly. I respect that, I really do - I hope you can in turn accept what I'm about to write with an open mind.

   I would very much like to volunteer my time and services to the St. Johns web site. I have a few years of experience programming in HTML and, I hope you take this in the mood of charity in which it is said, but it looks as if you could use the help.
   Why would I do this? Especially after everything I said above? Call it Catholic Guilt. Call it penance. Call it whatever you want. I'm thirty years old - it's time to let go of some of the anger from my youth. I hated George and the Church - but I loved St. Johns. Things Rome has done have angered me for decades, but I loved Father Molini. Sure, I hate George Wingberdingle, but I loved Dan Karcher and Sr. Mary Ann and Sr. Marjorie and Chris Anich and, yes, Sandy Brady. These people formed me. I learned from them and I owe them - heck they not only had to put up with George, they had to put up with me, too!
   Why the web page? Well, the simple truth is that I think it's the best thing I can do. First, I can't afford to send any money. Ain't got none! But, as I said above, I do HTML, both for fun and some professional work. Right now the only proof I have of my skills to show you is:

http://irateweirdos.com

   I'm a little leery about showing that to you. Not exactly the kind of thing we would want to show to high-schoolers. It's most certainly "R" rated for language and subject matter. The current posting, which might be archived by the time you read this, even has an entry on my exaggerated opinions of the Church and some of its current problems.
   However, all the HTML is mine or the other co-author's. You might recognize him, that's Bryan "Max" Dobberstein. My best friend, my best man and would-have-been grad of SJH had not George the Unethical kicked him out weeks before graduation, whoops! There's that temper again!
   Back to the point, we both code HTML by hand. All the art work that isn't an ad, and even one of those (YACCS) is mine and I do most of the maintenance. IWDC has been up for nearly two months and we're doing it in our spare time. Had I had more time to blow on it, considering it has yet to generate revenue, it would look much better than it does. This is my second dot com, my online comic strip has been off the net for about a year now.
   As for SJH's web site, I see a lot of potential. There are tons of things I would love to see happen. My Wife's alumni page has a description, a "Where are They Now" paragraph and even some pictures for every student dating back to the Forties - could you imagine? Now, imagine it on www.stjohnshigh.com! I see a banner across the top in Blue and Gold. I see buttons down the left side pointing to all kinds of resources. I see pictures and color. Heck, I even see an affiliate banner for classmates.com - maybe we can make a buck!
   I'm sure you all have your own ideas, and I'm also sure that another pair of hands could help you. If you want more proof of my skills, look up the yearbook for '90 - most of the candid photos in there are mine! I had trouble with the idea of exposure at the time - anything underexposed is most likely mine, too. One of my favorites is on page 49 - Lisa Olive and Pat Tighe in my Programming in Basic class. The look I got from Lisa after my shutter clicked would have frozen blood! I wish I had captured that on film, too!
   Speaking of making a buck, a good, eye catching web site will generate alumni cash from Gen X. They are used to it, they grew up with it. I was one of the movers on The New Echo, the school newspaper from my senior year, which was basically one Mac SE (one Mb RAM, no HD, 2 floppies!) in the hall broom closet and a lot of my free time. From that point on I have been told, SJH has only gotten more technical. The point is, if you want their money, you have to give them a reason to give. I want to be part of that reason.

   Alright, I'm nearly begging here, I'm out of caffeine and I've been writing this for over an hour and a half. The deal is that this is an offer I doubt you want to refuse. I know my junk, I have a great set-up for a hobbyist (Mac G4, Epson Scanner, PhotoShop, broadband connection - I even have video editing capability! If someone gets video of a winning goal - I can put it on the web!) I promise to be a good boy and keep my opinions off this site and on my own site where they belong. Plus, I'm willing to donate as much of my time and resources as I can. We can work out the details later - but, what do you say?

Jason "Jericho" Brown
Class of 1990
Angry Sinner, Reformed

   No one has returned this email. No matter what anyone tells you - turning thirty sucks!

Posted by: Jericho - 04/24/02 - 9:35 pm -

It Was 30 Years Ago Today

Well, actually it was three. Happy anniversary, Lurvie Butt. You deserve some kind of award for putting up with me for this long.

Our 1000th Visitor!

   On Friday night, at about 10:45 pm Pacific TIme, we had a visitor come in from AOL. This person was on a Macintosh and using Internet Explorer 4.0. If this sounds like you, let us know - you were our 1000th visitor! We would like to send you a couple of gifts. Please contact us!

   I'm very excited about this! I've been waiting to make this post for a few weeks. Since we started counting, about sixty days ago, we've had over one thousand "unique" visitors. That means they came in from a specific IP address for the first time that day. Well, most of us could visit and our ISP's would give us one IP and an hour later if we visited again, we'd have a different IP. So, of that 1000, quite a few are Max and myself coming out to have a look. But, not as many as you might think. In the past two months, mostly in the last month, we have started to get a real readership. This is due to two things; search engines and blog-rolling.

   We still get several hits from Google and others for things like "The Osbornes" and "Celeb Boxing" - "Tanya" is still our most popular keyword. But, we have started to get hits for words like "Irate" and "Weirdo". The great thing about these hits is that we are often third or fourth on the list - which means we are going to continue to see many hits from searches like this. Of course, we still get really odd hits for things like "taiwan star politician porn image" and "horny teacher" - but, hey, any hit is a good one! I love Google!

   However, more important than search engine hits are the hits we get from other blogs. This, if you don't know, is called blog-rolling. We have gotten many hits from our friends in the blog community - their generosity seems to be endless. The most hits came early in our counting from a single link off Doc Searles page the day Max lost his job. Doc has a pretty popular blog, we were grateful for the exposure - we got 74 hits over just a few days. We were stoked! Right behind Doc on our list is Ryan over at Becoming - we have 44 hits from him so far. Anita, my good friend, is third on our list with 18 hits. She gave us some link love last Saturday, check her out! Last but not least is Melly and her Daily Sardonicism, we've seen four hits from her. We hope whatever problems she's having with her blog get cleared up soon - I love reading her!

   It's so cool to watch something grow. Monday, April 1st was our last single digit day. In other words, most of April has seen visitors in the double digits. We had days with double digit visitors before then, but it would be one or two days in a row, then back to single digits. This month has been great so far - and I can't wait to see where we go from here. My hope is that in the next few weeks we'll have nothing but days with twenty or more visitors a day - we're really close to that now. To pull that off, we're going to have to give more content and better Features. We've got several things in the works - keep reading and tell a friend!

   If you haven't noticed, the Comments under each post have gotten really active recently. I know it often looks like Laura (Max's wife) and I arguing or a discussion with just a few of us - going off on some weird tangent. But, please, feel free to jump in and drag us back to topic. The Comments links are there for you! We want to hear your opinion!

   Thanks for coming out. We hope we have entertained you and brought a little fun and weirdness to your life!

Posted by: Jericho - 04/21/02 - 10:53 am -

Reruns

I have been back amongst the gainfully employed for about two weeks now and my life has once again fallen into a rut. I wake up, go to Taekwondo, come home, shower, read/watch the idiot box, go to work, come home, read/watch the idiot box, go to bed, rinse and repeat. Two days a week, instead of work I run errands or read/watch the idiot box a bit more.

This cannot be allowed to continue. I need more diversity in my life. And now that I am back on a proper nocturnal schedule, I don't have the excuse of being besotted by lack of sleep to keep me from going out and doing more. Maybe I can't have quite the globe trotting adventurer life style I crave (at least I won't until Laura succeeds in her plans to become rich by buying up downtown St. Louis) I can at least make the most of the time I have. I can hang out with friends at the local coffee bar. Laura and I can take a weekend drive to one of the many interesting little towns around here, or even to Chicago or Nashville. I coule take some time to write, or maybe grab a book and get a head start on learning C++. There is no reason for me to not grab a hold of life and start living.

Well, maybe next weekend.

© 2002 by the Gentlemen known as Max and Jericho