Memory relapse…
For half an hour, I felt as though I returned to when I started on the Internet, or more specifically, the World Wide Web, WWW. The state of mind when I just created my first website.
I was just doing my many rounds of clearing up (very) old HTML files that are not longer useful and I came upon this folder which looked very special. Upon entering it did I know why it is still there despite many cleanups of such directories - it was my first web-site, surprisingly still residing in my second hard disk after almost 6 years.
This site is visited (counter) times since 23/8/98
Down memory lane!
It revealed many histories of mine. For one, I had a record of me trying to work out an irritating worm with mIRC scripting, of the following characteristic :
And also, when you type “/load -rs “, it will add a few commands in the script and continue spreading to others scripts in this way even after the script is removed! And when on load, it will copy/duplicate about 50 files in your system. It will also send users when they joined the infected victims’ channels and the filenames are random. When you try DCC sending someone a file, it will follow the sedning and send the person another file which pretends to be an AntiVirus. And the worst is it set AUTOGET on! But it has a weak point in it! It will NOT infect other hard disk and ONLy C:!
Shame on me. I was such a script kiddie then. Unfortunately I failed to recover such file that I had written. Well, it could use some good laughs.
My first website was with the name mOOdy-pAnDA, a part-time nick that I found really cute. Anyway, I also had the nick mould which was my registered nick in DALnet then, in 1997.
DALnet is an IRC network with mostly foreigners and some Singaporeans. I hung out there for near 2 years, learning mIRC scriptings, basic knowledges of the Internet, the computers and most technologies. I would say it was a very good foundation I built that led to current knowledge.
But when I graduated and continued to Temasek Secondary School, I started joining GalaxyNet and neglecting DALnet a little by a little, and finally gave up going there at all after about a year. Actually something happened there and I wasn’t too happy. I was accused and a-kicked from #helpdesk for DDoS(Distributed Denial Of Service) without investigations. Sad. I didn’t do it. But after some time which I couldn’t remember, I was allowed back in and given back my a-voice status to continue helping. And then the ops I were familiar with left one by one, over the years. 3 years after I first began my virtual life there, it just wasn’t the same anymore. Pity, so I left, and that took place in 1999. When I visited them again back in 2002, things got worse. 90% of the operators there I couldn’t recognise nor recognise me. I still do miss some friends there, and I wonder if they even remember me.
The website also brought back memories of how 2 of my friends had their sites done, together with me, all hosted on xoom.com - which no longer exists. Too bad. Almost uncontrollably I recalled the good ol’ times I had when I was in primary school. Along with the other classmates, we had alot of funs together then, aww. And guess what? Our sites looked really alike. :D Lack of creativity caused that. Anyway I didn’t know any web standards then, so it was all hacked out in tables, and it was such a disaster now that I look at the HTML codes. CSS existed then, but it was still at its very infancy stage. And occasionally I did frame pages too. But nicer frame pages happened very much later, thanks god.
From one of the pages I actually dug up one joke. I don’t promise it’s funny! Anyway here it is.
One day, my friend told me that he dreamt that he had eaten the world largest marshmallow. And he woke up in the morning to found out that his pillow was gone!
I did smile when I read this. I wonder where I got this from; I believe I wasn’t capable of such jokes, now or then. Or did I dream of it myself? Well, I don’t remember any missing pillow cases down my memory lane.
From the wreckage, there was something that I didn’t manage to find. In fact, the whole lots of images in the website just weren’t there anymore. So disappointing. It was a picture of Winnie the Pooh and his friends, on the cliff looking at the stars in the blue nightsky. It was a very heartwarming picture. I can’t remember why though, but I really liked it alot maybe because of influence from that special someone back then. I’ll see if I could recover it anywhere online later.
I linked to my guestbook from the site, and wow was I amazed that the guestbook IS still active. And then I remembered more friends that I made. Sadly I am no longer in contact with anyone of them. And then I tried every link they posted in the guestbook to see if any was still active, and I finally found two. One of them belonged to a virtual (elder) sister I had in DALnet. She was a very nice lady and I wonder how she is now. I wish to tell her she’s missed, not that I expect she even remembers me at all. The other belonged to a random web-surfer. And both had their last update in 2001, one in October and one in March respectively.
So, where’s the first homepage I did now? I had uploaded only the index.html into /first-website/ directory. And from there you can access my guestbook, if you want you can still sign it! I don’t promise it will be there forever so take a look while you can. Keep in mind that it is an un-edited copy and it uses cookies and javascript to do certain functions. Not that it is malicious but I just have to tell you as it violates my policy statement for pages under my sub-domain.
Great, if you actually read all of the above, kudos to you and I hope you enjoyed reading as much as I had writing them.
Wow, I spent a hour writing this post. I like what I felt when I wrote this post though. Time passes really fast and a span of 6 years of my life just took place. I am just glad I cherished the moments back then.
Did you?