Wow, has it been 13 years?

The vast majority of posts have found their way up on From A to Z, a blog about Alex, or Twitter, or fastforwardblog, my old work blog. Since it's time to move on, I figured I'd capture more of my thoughts on my Established 1995 blog simply called An Unusual Day, where you are right now.

It's hard to believe this site was created 13 years ago. Since then many posts have gone up (almost none have come down) and it's had 3 facelifts and now is a full-fledged blog as opposed to just my html ramblings.

When it started, An Unusual Day was an experiment to help me learn more about coding and to just put up a web directory page about myself. This was early-1995, prior to Stanford GSB. At business school, it became more of an author's blog where I put up some of my stories, book reviews, novel, capsule film reviews, travel musings. It had a virtual interface of a room with various clickable elements. I spent far too much time drawing that room and making each rug, picture, chair clickable. It was obtuse and random but it had a look and feel of its own. Plus, the name was evocative and gave the user a sense of the serendipity of the collection of content on the site. You didn't know what to expect when you went there.

My friend Dan Glickman credits me for my capsule film reviews. He claims I was one of the first people on the web writing short film reviews for easy consumption and gave me credit for my signature feature, an equation which describes a movie. Say for example the latest Ricky Gervais movie Ghost Town = Signs * The Office (BBC version). I also had a film scoring database which recorded my ratings on hundreds of movies which I made accessible. There was also such junk as a fantasy hockey spreadsheet, an incomplete map of all the cities I had visited, and links to websites that had been defunct for over a decade. Mercifully, one of my hard drives crashed and much of that content is lost forever. Still, I think I was able to recover some of the better stuff here.

In 2002, my writing took a more prominent place on the site and An Unusual Day became really just a travelogue. Many of my stories were published on the web and in print and it served as a landing page for many readers to read more of my stuff.

In 2003, the site became a promotional site for my book, Losing Oneself in Remote Asia. My publisher helped me decide that it should be prominently displayed as the only reason people should come to An Unusual Day and that we should solely try to encourage clickthroughs to Amazon. It worked for a while, until the book went out of print (notice I didn't technically say sold out) and then the site was neglected for about a year as book sales ceased and it was yet another post-release book site.

Blogger came along and I decided to scrap the previous content and created a simple weblog with my daily (or really weekly) posts on where I had been and what I had seen and eaten. I ended up spending much more time on food (and far less time on me) and while I liked the read, it didn't inspire me to write more.

Alex came along in 2007 and boy oh boy, did I enjoy creating From A to Z. It's a private site for friends only but it gave me an outlet to simply update family and friends about Alex.

In the meantime, my blogging for work increased and my personal blogging became Twitterfied and An Unusual Day proper, again fell by the wayside.

But now, it's back. Perhaps with more of an angle on the serendipity of what you might find, should you meander around the real and digital world. I will talk about information access, about revolutions in the way we think, interact, and work. It will have 2.0 stuff in it but I hope to keep it more philosophical and less technology-oriented.

I say that with my first hyperlink, an interesting take on information by a professor in Kansas.