Seventeen class ago today I purchased the URLDisquiet.com .
Each passing year , when I have the time , I write a bit about that process , that time period .
I think I ’ll give myself the additionalOulipo constraintof utilizing only as many prison term as there are years to the anniversary , though of course of action parentheticals , em - dashes , semi - colons , and other delaying tactics will allow me some leeway .
One constraint that has been consistent over the years : I do n’t study back what I ’d write before , because part of this semi - annual reflection is allowing mis - rememberings to seep in ; I ’ve consider and read Rashomon enough to appreciate the value of multiple viewpoints , all the more so when those multiple viewpoints are one ’s own .
In 1996 I had strike to San Francisco right on around my natal day , August , from Sacramento , where I ’d been living since 1989 , after moving out from Brooklyn in 1989 to take a job at a euphony powder store , Pulse ! , published by Tower Records .
I ’d had various FTP and low - paint web presences since 1994 , around when 1993′s Mosaic web browser gave style to the Netscape web web browser , and mostly I used them as places to stash away small papers , to link to thing of pastime ( in 1994 there was only so much of non - scientific , non - governmental interest on the then very new World Wide World Wide Web ) , and to commit my HTML .
I considered various name calling for Disquiet.com , including Yellow and Cilantro , but finally went with Disquiet because I wasunder the tour of Fernando Pessoa ’s The Book of Disquiet , and because , understandably , the word primed so well with what I was interested in : quiet medicine , strait pull strings by electronics , shifts in cultivation as a result of technological augmentation .
As I think , purchasing the uniform resource locator involved a lot of non - Internet activity , including some headphone calls and faxing .
It also aim quite a while for the DNS system to function properly , so that entering the URL into the web web browser brought up the web page .
Even then , server clip - out and other upshot would often grant the site not charge .
I was , at the time , newly installed as editor program - in - chief of a website about San Francisco ( Citysearch.com ) , and my queasy weekend duties included waking up early and testing if the land site was live ( which it quite often was not ) , and then dealing with IT to rectify the situation .
At first , Disquiet.com was simply a repository of material I had release elsewhere , primarily at Pulse ! ( along with its sibling publishing Classical Pulse ! and epulse ) , where I continued to contribute until the magazine close in 2002 — this is whythe site ’s earliest postsactually predate the site ’s launching ; only afterwards on , when my friend Jorge Colombo suggested that I bug out date - stamp my berth , did this site become what would be term , later still , a blog .
Among my first free lance pieces for Pulse ! after leaving the cartridge fulltime was an consultation with Aphex Twin for his quasi - eponymous Richard D. James Album — I had no approximation at the time that I would 17 years later write a volume about Aphex Twin , albeit about the record he had released two year prior , Selected Ambient Works Volume II .
I would eventually write the binding taradiddle to the final issue of Pulse!:Missy Elliot .
TheAphex Twin interviewtook place in corporate housing ( i.e. , Noe Valley apartment abandoned by a senior Citysearch coach and filled with small cots , like a good theatre for contrary locomote salespeople ) , while I look for an apartment ( eventually landing one in the Richmond District , about which at the fourth dimension I knew absolutely nothing ) during what was likely an even more difficult metre to regain housing than is the case today .
I oft make listing of the 10 things I most thankful for , and this website has never drop off — and I am very much looking forward to what I will do on it ( andtangentiallyoffit ) in 2014 .
A web searchinforms methat December 13 , 1996 , was a Friday , just as it is today — so much for bad destiny .
Disquiet.com
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