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tubridy.net @ 25

tubridy.net turns 25 this year. Here is a bit of the history of how it got here.

I was working at the time providing marketing support to the third-party resellers of our software product IronCAD. The IT department had set me up to publish a secure portal on our corporate website to provide them with news and information about our product. I used the now-notorious FrontPage to do the authoring.

The notorious Microsoft FrontPage. It used tables to do web layouts which fell apart once browsers improved.

I decided to look into getting my own website – whatever that meant! I checked for tubridy.com but, alas, it was unavailable already. tubridy.net however was not. At that time Yahoo was the top dog in the internet world. I set up a hosting service with them that lasted over twenty years before switching to GoDaddy a couple of years ago.

tubridy.net V1 – Built on Microsoft FrontPage

I really liked the fact that I had an email address that was essentially my name. I used FrontPage to build a site to put my photos on and share personal news.

In 2008 when I got laid off for the last time, I decided to make the web my profession. I had been doing interface design at the time and discovered a career in user experience design just waiting for me!

tubridy.net V2 – Built using Dreamweaver but not very responsive for different screen sizes

I taught myself HTML and CSS and learned how to use Adobe Dreamweaver and multimedia tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premier Pro. I rebuilt my website using Dreamweaver and built other sites to develop my skills.

Other sites

M3
M Coupe

At about that time, I landed a job at a firm contracting to IBM as a User Experience Designer. Their third-party group was interested in my skills and experience in software marketing for their web group. I ended up working as a web designer for over 8 years with this group before retiring in 2018.

IBM Business Partner Portal – Text heavy and old school to start

I became interested in WordPress a couple of years into my stint with IBM. I used it to develop a website for a non-profit with the idea they could learn how to use it (they didn’t). I decided to switch my own site over around the same time. HTML coding was fine – for a while! WordPress also provided functionality it would be hard to develop on my own. This would be the third – lost – version of tubridy.net!

V3 – The lost version – no good backups 😟

I was still using Yahoo’s web hosting service which was sold in the mid-2010s to another company. At that time the quality of the hosting service really sucked and there were frequent problems. I had hoped the new company would improve but that did not materialize. It all came to a head when I lost the site in 2020 with no good backups.

I switched services and am now publishing with GoDaddy. What an improvement that was over the Yahoo crap!

V4 – The Excellent Adventure!

tubridy.net is officially in its fourth incarnation now. I have been building it out with content from the huge photo library I amassed over the years. I have published two of my Excellent Adventure trips so far and looking forward to a great trip in the spring of this year.

Goodbye City Hall

They are tearing down city hall. It’s been there all my life (that I remember) although it has changed over the years. I got my first speeding ticket shortly after learning how to drive and had to go to court there. I bailed out my friend Bill when he got busted for reckless driving!

After 60 years they are tearing down the old city buildings on the corner of Minuteman and Orlando

The corner of Minuteman and Orlando is the heart of the true Cocoa Beach. Compared to Tourist Cocoa Beach whose city hall is Ron Jon’s Sufshop. World’s Largest Surfshop and Cocoa Beach Eye-sore. Don’t even get me started.

The Silver Surfer at Cocoa Beach’s finest parking garage!

They have been slowly replacing the city offices. first was the Fire Station. Then we got a three-story parking garage and the silver surfer 😎. Then a new cop shop 👮🏻‍♀️. Then and giant cell tower 😵‍💫.

Conceptual design for new City Hall, green space, and parking garage. The new Fire department is in the lower left.

Now we get a new city hall and what they are calling a community greenspace. Likely they will set this up for street festivals with food vendors and places to buy T-Shirts. Finally, another parking garage because as my hero Joni says:

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone?
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot

Joni Mitchell

Falcon Heavy 🚀

SpaceX fired off its 5th Falcon Heavy yesterday evening. It had been cold with very low humidity the past few days. Together with the sunset this made for mind-numbingly spectacular views of the launch. Particularly, the separation of the side boosters and their descent back to a near-simultaneous landing at the cape. My photo above – photos below courtesy of SpaceX 🚀.

🌜Dear Moon*

What’s not to love about Peter? He takes his time but nobody can craft songs like this guy…

‘Some of what I’m writing about this time is the idea that we seem incredibly capable of destroying the planet that gave us birth and that unless we find ways to reconnect ourselves to nature and to the natural world we are going to lose a lot. A simple way of thinking about where we fit in to all of this is looking up at the sky… and the moon has always drawn me to it.’

Peter Gabriel – New Release 2023

Check this out:

Panopticom

* This is also fucking awesome: dearMoon Project

4543002023

I live on a pretty famous road. Mostly it’s renowned because of Jimmy Buffet. I was a Parrot Head from the early 80s and knew all of his best songs by heart. A misplaced Florida boy living in dreary Seattle!

Jimmy Buffett A1A

If you leave my house and head south (which is the only way you can turn because it is a one-way road at this point) you will eventually end up in Key West. It also happens to be the singular path south through Cocoa Beach. You cannot often get a selfie standing in the middle of the road!

South A1A
South A1A

It’s been a foggy couple of mornings so there is no sunrise this new year. Looking forward to a healthy one if possible and the third installment of ‘Excellent Adventure – The Left Coast’ come spring.

4th Street overpass to Mother Ocean

Peace out ✌🏻😎🐶☮

Winter Solstice 2022

Another year has gone by, and time seemly speeds up with every passing year!

Tis the Reason for the Season

Since we have now entered a post-fact era, I decided it makes much more sense for today to be the last day of the year as well as the celebration of last year’s trip around the Sun. It makes a lot more sense in light of the fact that it is the shortest day of the year (at least in the Northern Hemisphere where thing count 😂) and it’s all uphill from here. Plus it gets rid of all of those other wanna-be celebrations that are, in fact, all derived from the Solstice.

Mother Earth

So in our little corner of the space-time continuum, tomorrow will be New Year’s Day and 2023 will begin! And since we’re at it we should really append the age of the earth onto the date too.

Happy New Year 4543002023*!

*Plus or Minus 50 Million Years 🤩

Jake 🐶 and Grogu 🐸

Moral materialism

I have been trying to gain a better understanding of how we Americans have gotten to the point we are – as fucked up as it seems. I found an article that summarizes a view taken by the late historian David Potter:

The European settlers who first came to the country found forests stretching on forever, flocks of geese so large that they required 30 minutes to take off. All of this possibility drove the settlers sort of mad. They found themselves walking more in a day than they had ever imagined, dreaming dreams bigger than they had ever imagined. These immigrants, the ones who weren’t brought here in chains, turned entrepreneurial, disordered, antic, religiously zealous, morally charged, messianic, and perpetually restless. They measured their life by how much they had grown and how far they had climbed. They were propelled by a central contradiction: They had this intense spiritual drive to complete God’s plans for humanity on this continent—and they also had this fevered ambition to get really rich. They were propelled by a moral materialism that would never let them rest.

This follows several ideas that continually pop into my head: Manifest destiny and the fact that – indeed – America was founded as a Christian nation. I have, in the past, confused freedom of religion with freedom of belief.

Artemis SLS Launch

After several tries, starting in August, NASA was finally able to launch SLS (Space Launch System) with the unmanned Orion capsule as part of the Artemis program (Artemis I). The capsule will orbit the moon and return in a shake-down run for sending astronauts there in the coming years.

Apollo 17 – December 19, 1972

I watched the last Saturn V rocket with Apollo 17 launch at night 50 years ago. My girlfriend’s father got us to Kennedy Space Center to view it. It was delayed but finally went up in the early morning hours. It lit up the sky and the roar was deafening. It was fantastic to see the successor launch all these years later.

Splashdown

I watched the splashdown and did some screenshots as it landed off the coast of California.

Interestingly, the splashdown occurred on the same date as the last lunar lander on Apollo 17 landed on the moon – 50 years later – during my senior year in high school 😵‍💫.