for the second time in as many weekends i’ve found myself wasting potential.

last weekend it was the wedding of paul and geneva. it was a beautiful ceremony and the entire enterprise was made a thousand times better by the presence of jerry, probably the funniest man i have ever met. at the catered reception however, the father of the bride presented us with a veritable cornucopia of drink tickets, each worth one beer or glass of wine. at the end of the night we found ourselves slightly inebriated and with 30 tickets sitting before us on the table. uncharacteristically we chose to walk away.

this evening i went to clean up the keg post-party and found it still somewhat laden with beer, but how much? after pouring myself a half-glass of warm porter and adding some vanilla ice cream (because how does susan kim roll? she rolls well.) i proceeded to fill up an empty 20oz mug with porter to empty out the dregs.

it came out full. unable to drink it, i poured it down the drain. in the interest of science, i went to fill it up again with the dregs, just to see what remained. seven such glasses later – 160oz in total, i found myself almost weeping for the beer i couldn’t bring myself to drink.

in all i hope it was a good party. i do apologize for being a poor birthday boy, it’s hard for me to host well, and harder still for me to enjoy myself whilst doing so. so far in my 26th year i’ve learned that monkeys grow on trees and that pony kegs have alot of beer in them.

in the late 1980s the internet was a spry and wonderful thing. there were a number of methods for querying remote servers – gopher, archie, ftp, even the lowly finger command. this hyper-text transport protocol thing was just starting to take off, but the two staples of the network were the smtp protocol – email – and the uucp protocol, internet news known as usenet. those of you a little less beardy in the internet might know usenet as ‘google groups’, since they bought out the dejanews archives some time ago.

i cut my chops on usenet after moving up from the bulletin board systems in my hometown, but most people were first exposed to them when they arrived their first day at university.

the internet has it’s own set of customs and traditions, and it works smoothly as long as they are reasonably followed. make sure you quote part of the message you are replying to. don’t reply to list when you mean to reply to someone personally. don’t be a tremendous asshole. spellcheck. etcetera. that the internet works at all is largely a social phenomenon more than a technological one.

each september a new set of students would show up, get their accounts, and immediately begin breaking every single one of these rules. after a while they’d get bored, banned, or they’d learn from the regulars how to fit in and behave on the ‘information superhighway’ and things would return to normalcy for another eleven months.

in 1993 all of this changed. america on-line connected it’s online service with the internet. suddenly thousands of new users flooded onto the network and there was no hope of slowly educating them into becoming productive members of society. this was the beginning of the end for public conversation on the internet. every day aol found new members to sign up, and most of them went right to the first thing they could find – newsgroups are of a like to the chatrooms aol had previously popularized – and immediately posted “hey what’s up i’m on the internet!”.

thus was born the term “endless september.”

the historical endless september actually ended on 25th january 2005 (september 4165, 1993) when aol disconnected it’s service from usenet. of course with the propagation of the internet throughout the world, the growth of the internet will never really get back to that slow trickle of college students once a year.

alternate title: or, look i’m a blogger and i would like to whine about my personal life to the Internet

i don’t have anything to say other than i like the idea of texts with four or five alternate titles that basically tell the whole story, such that the story itself need not have content. or even exist for that matter.

suffice to say that i am looking forward to my birthday party this weekend with some trepidation. despite the fact that i seem like an outgoing person, when hosting i really do prefer to hide behind the barbeque and just cook the grillables and drink my beer and talk with the few folks who stop by where i’m standing to say hi. the fact that i’m already planning this out in advance is a new thing for me, but at least i’m being honest about it.