Life & Research Notes

In an effort to soothe my increasingly compounded stresses about starting a new business, surviving the impending economic doomsday, and feeling sad about the retardation of the U.S. political process, I spent some time tonight looking through my various feeds. It’s basically the digital equivalent of sucking my thumb, though certainly more sanitary, and less likely to gross out the cute tat’d hipster girl at Ritual.

I guess it was a luckily-timed retreat to my introverted comfort habits, as I just happened on the Google 2001 search via my friend Burak Arikan’s wonderful del.icio.us links! Of course as a longtime and predictably self-conscious netizen, one of my first searches was for myself, “Brent Fitzgerald.” I was pleased and a little surprised to see myself at the top of the list.

Clicking into the Internet Archive version of the result, I was treated to a nice semi-broken page with one of those damned weird scanned baby images I was so fond of back then.

Then another broken image (along the lines of this one I think), and uh, wow, pretty much a cliché 2001-era recent college grad home page:

Oh man, what a winner. It reeks of that period of low self-esteem, worn out irony, and melancholic directionless, all with a savory hint of marijuana. From there, I even found my old resume, which clearly suffered from some highly questionable typography choices.

So I wonder… between Google keeping track of everything we do on the web, plus better, more OS-integrated personal backups, perhaps all is not so lost after all, even the stuff you really wouldn’t mind losing, like your lame post-college website.

respond / trackback