It’s Friday! With high temps now dipping into the 50s and falling fast, I figured it was time to call my insurance guy and switch the Corvette to inactive status. In the next few days it’ll head into storage where it’ll sadly stay for the winter months. It’s hard to believe, but November—and all the fun that comes with winter—isn’t far off. We even had our first freeze warning last night, so it’s only a matter of weeks before the horrid white stuff starts falling. If anyone happens to have a place in Florida they won’t be using this winter, I’d be happy to look after it for you… free of charge!
Okay, it’s time to wrap this up for the weekend. Once again I have some amateur goodness for this Friday, along with the usual double babes & jokes. Enjoy!
-keep
Keeper, It’s getting cold but you should be grateful that you’re not up here in Minnesota! We’ve been in flannel weather for weeks now. I’m sending you proof (gf) that you can share with your readers if you want. Keep warm down there because it’s going to get worse before it gets better! -Anonymous
30th Anniversary
It’s Monday. Back in 1995, the internet was a very different place—more like a digital frontier than the bustling metropolis it is today. Most people got online through noisy dial-up modems that tied up the household phone line and crawled along at painfully slow speeds. Websites were simple, text-heavy, and often filled with garish backgrounds and blinking GIFs. Search engines were in their infancy, so finding anything usually meant browsing through directories like Yahoo or manually typing in web addresses you heard about from friends or magazines. Email felt revolutionary, chat rooms were the social media of the time, and downloading a single image could take several minutes. Despite all that, in early October 1995, I decided that it might be fun to build a website.
There weren’t many Internet Service Providers to choose from back in 1995. I was using AOL and CompuServe at the time, but I knew neither was the right fit to host my website. Then I heard about a new local ISP called CNSnet that offered reasonable rates and, more importantly, no content restrictions. I decided to sign up and start building my site, though I had no idea it would soon become CNSnet’s biggest headache.
When I began developing the site, I had two main goals: first, to create something more interesting than the dull, text-heavy websites of the day; and second, to get it in front of as many eyes as possible. It didn’t happen overnight, but by November of 1995, the site was pulling enough traffic to regularly overload CNSnet’s server. That led to a rocky relationship. They’d tweak their setup to handle the load, it would hold for a day or two, and then crash again. They were frustrated because their other customers were complaining that the server was down, and I was frustrated because my site was frequently down. It became clear I needed a new host.
I reached out to an old acquaintance from my BBS days who had started his own ISP called UTI (Under The Influence). I explained the situation and warned him about the heavy traffic involved. To my surprise, he agreed to host the site and for years, my site ran flawlessly at UTI without a single issue. I stayed with them until they eventually shut down, another casualty of the big corporate wave as giants like GoDaddy and HostGator took over and priced out the smaller ISPs.
I hated to see UTI go, but that’s the nature of the ever evolving web.
And that’s how this place started and how it got here today. When it ends, who knows. But whether you’ve been around since the early days or just discovered it recently, I truly appreciate your support, donations, and content contributions. Here’s to 30 years and thank you for being part of the ride.
-keep
Oh, and I decided to switch things up a bit. Instead of the usual single daily babe, I’m posting 30 of them—one for every year this site has been around. But after looking at the lineup, 30 just didn’t feel like enough to properly celebrate, so I bumped the number up a little. Enjoy!