phil ringnalda

I got to thinking, after Tom at plasticbag was buttering me up, that I’m not doing near enough buttering up, myself. Thus, a sappy paean to Ev. and his former crew. Last spring, while I was getting bored with the commercial internet, I somehow ran across not.so.soft and, undoubtedly like many others, thought “I should do that” (failing to realize that Meg is brilliant, and that I can’t write for sour apples), and rushed off to Blogger. Lucky for me, while I was realizing that my life is too damn dull to be worth blogging, and my snarky comments on links are, shall we say, a bit too snarky, I discovered Blogger Discuss, where there were people begging for help, asking questions that even I could answer.

Once I realized that gary and michael, the only other people answering any questions at the time, weren’t employees, they were just users helping out other users, I started looking around for the employees, and came across the sad, sad, heartbreaking (is that sappy? sure, but I still say it’s heartbreaking, and I only hope that someday I’ll help create something I feel that strongly about), story of the breakup of Pyra. So, all these users were creating all this fascinating content through a system being run by one person. Simply amazing. And I started spending more time in Discuss, started blogging the things I was answering most often, writing add-ons, and eventually, emailing Ev. about broken things that I thought he hadn’t noticed. And for nine months now, probably around a thousand hours, I’ve kept doing it, sending Ev. who knows how many emails, and of all those, probably five have been something other than “hey, something’s broken, you better fix it.” So, to partly counter all that gloom, I would like to say thanks to all the Pyrates for creating something wonderful, that restored my faith in the internet when it was almost gone, and especially thanks to Ev. for keeping it going through all the dark hours of server outages, ISP screwages, sniping, backbiting, second guessing, whining, wave after wave of new users, cracks and second guessings without first thoughts (yes, Jason, I mean you). You’ve given me so much to learn, and so many hours of fun, that I hardly even look at those shiny new toys (just enough to add to my Blogger wishlist). Damn, it’s been a fun nine months. Thank you.