The Book of the Dead

For a guy who makes his living in the IT field today, I was a latecomer to all things computer.

In the late eighties I had one or two semesters of a computer class in high school. Very basic programming... (I think it was literally in Microsoft Basic). Green and black monitors. A few quick commands and you could make the screen fill up with your name.

My lab partner and I soon bored with the assignments.. and so we undertook a project of our own. Once I learned the command for making the computer play a tone for a certain length of time. (it was something like [SOUND 3, 22] for each note... or something like that.)

I decided we were going to program the computer to play the guitar solo "Eruption" off of Van Halen's first album.

In one of my many guitar player magazines I had Steve Vai's written transcription of Eddie's masterpiece. So I started there and got to writing down the program on paper at home.

Every day in class, instead of doing our classwork, we would work on programming "Eruption". Then... in the last few minutes of class... we would find a classmate who was having problems with their classwork and quickly debug it for them. (It was usually a simple typo) and then save a copy to turn in as our own work for the day.

The problem was the enormity of the project. We got 1/3 of the solo done before the semester was finished. (I should have started with the last 1/3rd... that is when the fun stuff comes in.)

I still have the big floppy somewhere. But nothing to read it with and the data has long ago degraded. But though it was 8-bit... we were on our way to an impressive feat that was sure to firmly secure our place in Sheridan High School history.

After that, I really didn't do much with computers. I was a music major for a year in college.... then an art instruction major.... then I moved to Atlanta and attended the Art Institute to study Photography for 2 years.

It was well before the digital revolution, so we had ONE "Computers in Photography" class which never even got into Photoshop (if it was around back then.)

All my photography classes were film... camera.. and chemistry. (I didn't even break down and buy a digital camera until 2017.. stubbornly clinging to the F4 and Hasselblad and Sinar. Not that I did much shooting after 2000 or so.)

It was probably around 1995 or 1996 when my buddy, Gordon, turned up at my apartment with a bunch of parts and said "We are going to build you a computer." It was a i386 I think... with 8MB of RAM and Windows 3.11 on it. I think it had Windows Office but as far as I know it might have been pirated. Too long ago to remember. I don't claim to have ALWAYS been by-the-book on everything.

Then I got a modem and set out to figure out how all this stuff worked... starting with email and word processing with Microsoft WORD.

One of the first things I did was to go get a book off my shelf on extinct animals and typed up the paragraphs on the "Quagga"... It was one of the first extinct animals I had ever learned about when I was learning to read at age 5. It was a variant of Burchell's Zebra that only had stripes on the head. I inserted a GIF of a drawing of one and then forwarded the word document to some friends. There is no telling how long it took to send over my old router but it went eventually.

I had no purpose other than just playing around to learn how to do things on my computer.

But my friend Bob, who was way more advanced than me, took my document and set up a rudimentary web site. I was fascinated. I wasn't interested in learning to code HTML at the time but I got a copy of Adobe PageMill and learned to how set up a web page. I didn't even know that this was a thing regular people did before Bob did it.

I chose the name "Steve's Typewritten Book of the Not-So-Grateful Dead" and I would do pages on different extinct animals when I felt moved to. I later branched out in to odd color phases of animals.. pages on White Buffalo... pages on the Kermode Bear, a white color phase of the American Black Bear that shows up in British Columbia in a small area. This section I called the "My-nagerie" and the page containing both sections became "Steve's Hodge-Page". It was written more on a young teen and pre-teen level. Kinda chatty stuff.

This was in the very early days of the internet and there were simply not many sites about extinct animals. So my page got pretty popular. By today's standards, the design is primitive and rudimentary... but at the time, it looked better than many of the sites. And I was about the only site on the subject of historical extinction, which is a subject that had always fascinated me.

Pretty soon I was getting emails from all over the world, and thousands and thousands of hits.

Kids doing school projects on different extinct animals... Magazine writers complimenting me on my writing style.... I somehow ended up as a Wikipedia source on the Kermode Bear... I was interviewed for the book "Internet Guide to Birds and Birding: The Ultimate Directory to the Best Sites Online" by Jack Sanders, which was published in the year 1999. (Many of my pages were about extinct birds such as the Carolina Parakeet, Passenger Pigeon, and Ivory Billed Woodpecker.)

Later, in 2005, when Scientists from Cornell claimed to have rediscovered the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in eastern Arkansas. My page count went crazy. I was the first or second hit if you googled "Ivory-Billed Woodpecker" (and MANY people were googling it at that time.)

At one point, when the page was going strong.. I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

I had an Australian.. (or maybe it was New Zealand)... television producer contact me. He wanted to do a series of kids programs and wanted me to write the part of an animated computer who would teach them about extinct animals... at least I think that was the gist of the offer. All he needed me to do was to put up a few more posts on animals so he could pitch it and get the ball rolling.

but I, at the time, was spending more time on my band's web presence and so I completely just... dropped the ball. We emailed a few times and I was like... "Yeah man.. I will get some stuff up..." and I never did.. and never replied to him again.

Who knows what would have come from it? Maybe nothing... or maybe the start of something cool.

Perhaps the pressure was too much and my confidence in my abilities was too low.
I don't know.

I THINK it was just laziness, though.

We don't get a second chance sometimes. That is life. You have to see the opportunities when they come... for what they are truly worth.. and I didn't.

Eventually the "deadbook" just went away when I stopped using that ISP. I have it backed up on a drive at the house... I would never think to try to start it up it again.

I was just at the right place at the right time. Now there are hundreds of sites about extinct animals and I wouldn't get ten views a month.

But for a while... I was a mighty web designer and one of the world wide web's foremost authorities on extinct species. It is funny. It looks SO rudimentary now. But few could imagine the state of most web design in the late 90's if you weren't there to see it.

Little did they know I was just a broke photographer doing it from the bedroom of my tiny two room apartment because I was bored and lonely. Reaching out to talk about something nearly nobody was interested in but me. I found people all over the world who cared about it.