Photos I had forgotten I had taken

Started: 2019-12-14 22:46:25

Submitted: 2019-12-15 00:45:38

Visibility: World-readable

In which the intrepid narrator reviews two decades of photos and finds pictures he'd forgotten about

When I started working on Google Analytics last year, I added analytics tags to my website so I could experience the product as an end-user. (To the extent that I could claim to be a credible end-user who only posts for my own amusement and doesn't care about monetizing my site in any way. I'm not even trying to build my brand or convince you to sign up for my newsletter.) This is mostly so I can look at my site analytics and try to guess what the anonymous person on the other end of the browser was trying to do when they found themselves on my site. (It also led me to make various improvements like cleaning up my url scheme, mostly so I could understand the urls I see in the analytics console.)

Along the way I was reminded that Google has indexed all of the pictures I've posted on this site going back to 1998. Most of this archive is dark and unobserved, but sometimes weird things become oddly popular (like my picture of the home network box I built in Boulder). Some of the pictures, though, are old embarrassing pictures of people I went to college with, many of whom I identified by name. I finally got around to scrubbing the two thousand pictures I took in college, protecting mostly the ones that personally identified people. (I left most of the festing crowd's pictures up, since I know y'all better and I tend to use your hacker aliases, not your real names.)

(It also occurred to me to wonder, given that I was posting pictures on the Internet in the early days of online photo sharing, was there an alternate history where I figured out how to let other people share their photos, and did that service become popular? Maybe that's what x13 could have been instead. And then, because it was 1999, it probably would have gotten bought out by Yahoo! or something.)

And in the process of reviewing two thousand pictures I ran across a handful of pictures I had forgotten that I had taken; and now I want to share them again.

This is my freshman dorm room, Culver Hall room 239 at Union College in Lincoln, Nebraska.

I have a habit of photographing my living spaces; and when I look back at the pictures I wonder whether I still have any of the physical artifacts pictured in the photographs. In this picture above I have the Star Trek: First Contact mousepad; everything else is no longer part of my life.

This is the shortest my hair has been during my adult life. Aside from six months in 1999 I've worn my hair in a ponytail since high school.

Two of my roommates my sophomore year were TAs for freshman computer science. This was 1999 so the Pascal programs were submitted on 3.5" floppies. (And now it occurs to me that current TAs for freshman computer science students had not been born yet — let alone the students.)

I lived on Morgan Drive in south Boulder for more than eight years, from the end of 1991 to 2000 — the longest I've ever lived in a single house. This is one of the few pictures I have of the house where I grew up.

My father observed Y2K by checking NERC's website to see how the change of the calendar affected the electric power industry.

I found, in a parking lot behind the CU dorms in Boulder, an old transformer; and I was most impressed by the power coupling.

I am endlessly amused by taking pictures of myself in mirrored windows, as this picture at the Chan Shun Pavilion at Walla Walla College suggests.

Here I attempt to explain how we're going to select a movie to watch. (Any decision scheme that requires an elaborate explanation is probably more complicated than it needs to be. Or maybe it's not, and instant-runoff voting is really the best way to make choices between multiple options in a diverse group.)

This was my first mobile phone. It portended my future career development with its "Digital by Qualcomm" sticker on the back.

Finally, a picture from my family trip to Rome with Kiesa in 2002. She still uses any downtime as an excuse for reading, though now while out and about she tends to read on her phone, not a mass-market paperback.