Meet: Chitika’s Daniel Dore
I’ve always had a really difficult time throwing anything away. Even as a kid I’d hold on to useless scraps of paper assuming they might be important later, even as fire starter. You never know when that homework assignment from third grade or that birthday card your grandmother will come in handy. The same logic applies to my online world, as well. I was a “late-bloomer” in regards to computers and the internet – I didn’t have an internet connection until 1998 so all those early interent memes such as the ‘Dancing Baby‘ (sort of the Chuck Norris of its day) were still new and exciting to me in ’03.
I recently upgraded my computer and decided to archive a bunch of my old files, as well as clean up my hideously long list of bookmarks, and I was quite amused by what used to dominate my time. Here’s a few selections from that list:
Homestar Runner: Oh, Strong Bad…what wacky hijinks are you involved in this week? 2003 me loved this site, and happily showed it to all my mildly disinterested friends (please note that I was in my 20s at this point).
SparkNotes: I love to read, I really do; I was just going through a rebellious stage from 2001-2005 where I was too lazy or too preoccupied to crack open a book, and yet too frugal to purchase the Cliffs Notes for said books. (just a quick note to any students out there: if a teacher or professor tells you that you’re misinterpreting the meaning of a particular chapter, “that’s what SparkNotes said it meant” is not a valid argument. Live and learn.)
Excite: I can already hear the cries of “what about Lycos, you fool?!?”, but I preferred Excite’s customized homepage for my news and information, and nobody could convince me otherwise. But it was only for their homepage, for my email heart belonged to another…
Juno: That’s where I carefully stored my 1MB of email! Send me a CD in the mail promising me an email account and “exclusive free offers” and I’m yours forever. Or until 2004.
Computing.net: College students will do strange things for food; that’s why every event on a college campus offers free food as a selling point (and why the “Freshman 15” is now more accurately the “Freshman 25”). I used to fix the computers around my dormitory in exchange for sandwiches from the campus deli, and this site was my oracle for any solution that eluded me.
So what was on your bookmarks list of yore?
Posted By: Daniel Dore, Publisher Support Manager