My latest #LocalHistory post has more than a tiny element of #PersonalHistory, as it's about my elementary #school (and its predecessor of the same name). I was lucky enough to find some great #ClassPhotos and shots of the #playground, where I spent thousands of hours of my youth.
#histodons #upstateNY #UpstateNewYork #Schenectady #ScotiaNY
In undergrad at Brigham Young University I told a friend I had declared #psychology as my major. The friend misquoted a former president of the LDS church: "Spencer W. Kimball said a degree in the social sciences is nothing but a degree in the errors of man." The #LDS church's relationship to #socialScience has been similar to that of some other American Christian religions--i.e., lots of suspicion and dismissal, with occasional full condemnation.
30+ years later I have to say that the "errors of man" has been a deeply satisfying, endlessly interesting domain of study.
#story #PersonalHistory #religion #science #byu #exmormon #highered
Today I worked on a desk that is almost a hundred years old.
It was commissioned in the late 1920s or early ’30s by my grandfather, for his sons. One of them was my father. It’s made of walnut, built in a workshop somewhere in Muntenia, in a time when objects were meant to last.
This desk has travelled through three generations, through houses, wars, relocations, and decades of quiet persistence. My grandfather touched it, then my father, and now it’s the surface where I write.
There’s a small crack on the top — old wood has its own memory. I don’t hide it; it’s part of the story.
When I rest my hand on it, I feel a steady line stretching back through the people who came before me. Not nostalgia, but orientation.
A reminder that I’m not starting from nothing.
That I belong to a thread that continued, even when lives became complicated or broke apart.
This desk is not furniture. It’s a witness. It’s the only family object that still works alongside me, almost a century later.
The photo will come later.
I just wanted to write this down first — a note to myself, at a time when I need to remember that some things do remain steady in this world.
#WritingCommunity #FamilyHistory #Heirlooms #Memory #WalnutDesk
#Romania #PersonalHistory #WritersLife
The Day I Said No to Google – DrWeb’s Domain
A personal essay… from DrWeb
The Day I Said No to Google
“I am probably the only person I know who said ‘no’ to Google in a meeting with Larry Page and Sergey Brin…”
Confession: Given my birthday coming up (hint!), I am older than dirt. Some of the memories remain, thank genes I guess. But, others are foggy. I remember the day, but the exact date escapes me. I remember the meeting, but in many ways, it has blurred into meetings of my life for business. So, I cheated, kinda. You get to decide. Claude, a creative intelligence, assisted me with the writing. I edited. This is what we did together. It felt like the best way to tell this old story now. Let’s travel back to yesteryear.. the Internet was young… One history note, I was the first Webmaster at DIALOG, and employed there from 1995-1997, when along with many others, MAID bought DIALOG, and I was let go, fired. Carry your things out in box time. My time at America Online was December, 1998, Product Manager for AOL NetFind, until November, 1999. Enjoy the memory lane!
The Meeting Above the Shop
The afternoon sun streamed through the windows of that small conference room above a Palo Alto shop, casting long rectangles of California light across our makeshift boardroom table. It was one of those perfect Silicon Valley days where the air itself seemed to hum with possibility, but the fluorescent overhead lights and generic office chairs reminded us this was business, not a social call.
I’d arranged my materials carefully before they arrived—a brief summary report for my AOL team, printed specs for what we needed, bottled water for everyone. The kind of preparation that had become second nature after years in this business [and later becoming DIALOG’s first webmaster dealing with sophisticated databases and searches], now managing search for America Online in this digital Wild West. Twenty-five million AOL users were counting on decisions like this one, though they’d never know it.
When Larry and Sergey walked in, there was something almost academic about them—Larry doing most of the talking while Sergey hung back, observing. Their energy was unmistakably that of people who believed they were onto something big. But belief and business results were different things, as I’d learned the hard way. Perhaps it was like meeting Steve Jobs, early, in his garage.
We think we can scale this in ways nobody else can, Larry was saying, sketching out their vision with the kind of confident hand gestures. You could hear the enthusiasm.
The algorithm they called PageRank sounded revolutionary in theory—ranking pages by how other pages linked to them, like academic citations. Elegant, certainly. But elegant theories didn’t always survive contact with millions of real users hitting your servers every day. Then, at AOL, we were still in the era of typing in code and managing data with spreadsheets, so, yes, after all—proven performance mattered more than brilliant concepts.
The afternoon conversation had that particular rhythm of meetings where both sides already knew the likely outcome. We asked about customers—they had few. Performance metrics under load—they were working on it. Detailed technical specifications—still being refined.
I felt those were all reasonable answers for a startup, but AOL couldn’t run on reasonable answers. We needed proven, and growign solutions, the kind Excite was delivering with their concept-based search algorithm and comprehensive portal approach—news, weather, email, the one-stop destination our users expected. I used Excite, so were many early adopters.
I found myself watching Sergey more than listening to Larry at one point. There was something in his quiet attention that suggested he understood exactly what we were really evaluating. Not just their technology, but their readiness to handle the weight of AOL’s scale and expectations. Maybe he knew, as I was beginning to suspect, that this was more a friendly courtesy call than a serious negotiation.
The meeting wound down with handshakes and the kind of polite enthusiasm that masks mutual recognition—they knew we weren’t ready to bet on an unproven system, and we knew they weren’t ready for us yet. Outside, that sunlit, warm California afternoon continued, indifferent to the small pivotal moment that had just passed in a conference room above a Palo Alto shop.
Later, writing up my report for the team, I found myself thinking about Steve Case back at headquarters in Virginia. Our larger-than-life CEO had built AOL by making bold bets, but also by knowing when to stick with what worked. Excite had customers, track records, proven performance under the kind of load we’d throw at them. Our homework showed the numbers, and it was a future option we felt we had to explore.
Their concept-based searching could understand meaning beyond mere keyword matching—sophisticated technology that had already proven itself with millions of daily users. It wasn’t glamorous compared to Larry and Sergey’s academic theories, but it was safe. And yet, choosing Excite felt like the next step, of what would be many.
I never found out if my report made it all the way to Case’s desk, but I liked to think it did—one small decision in the endless stream of choices that kept twenty-five million people connected to the emerging world of the web. At the time, it felt like the right call. Careful. Responsible. Business-smart.
The irony, of course, would only become clear later.
#1999 #2000 #2025 #AI #AmericaOnline #AOL #California #Essay #Excite #Google #History #Irony #Opinion #PaloAlto #PersonalHistory #Science #searchTechnology #Technology #UnitedStates #UniversityAvenue
Gary Shteyngart’s Tragicomedy of the Penis in “The Guy Who Got Cut Wrong”
I ran across this picture of the most important person in my life and keep feeling all the feelings over it. We were 18, and she was helping me out with a class project, glamming herself up in a way that she didn't ordinarily do then to pose for this picture (the purpose of which I've forgotten).
All I can see is: we were so young, and she is so beautiful. And still is, an awful lot of years later.
Special Collections: Where the old stuff never gets old – Deseret News
Special Collections: Where the old stuff never gets old
Librarian Cherie Willis shows off the Main Library’s historical treasures
Published: Aug 31, 2025, 8:00 p.m. MDT
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Librarian Cherie Willis shows “The Birds of America” by John James Audubon, printed in 1860, at The City Library in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2025. It is the library’s most valuable piece. Kristin Murphy, Deseret News Purchase ImageBy Lee Benson
Lee has written slice-of-life columns for the Deseret News since 1998.
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It’s 10 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, the library has just opened, and Cherie Willis is already having a good time.
Cherie is the gatekeeper for the Special Collections section of the Salt Lake City Main Library, a room chock full of treasured books, publications and other artifacts, some of them dating back well before the library’s beginnings in 1898.
For Cherie, who has a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Utah and a master’s degree in library science from BYU, it’s clear that, to her, the old stuff never gets old. It’s like we just opened King Tut’s tomb.
The materials are all Utah related. There are no first editions of Shakespeare or Cervantes. But there is a first edition of “Route from Liverpool to Great Salt Lake Valley.” Published in 1855, the lengthy book, a long-ago precursor of Google Maps, goes into great detail describing how to get from England to the Salt Lake Valley without winding up in Bolivia.
“Getting here from England was tough,” says Cherie. “Back then it was like getting to Mars.”
A list of those with scarlet fever, smallpox and diphtheria is pictured in the special collections area of The City Library in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2025. If someone on the list had library materials, the books were burned upon their return in an attempt to stop the spread of disease. | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News Purchase ImageNext, Cherie holds up a rare (although not first-edition) copy of “A Study in Scarlet,” a book published in 1887 by Arthur Conan Doyle that introduced Sherlock Holmes and his trusty confidant Watson to the world for the first time. The reason the book written by an Englishman and published in England is in Special Collections in Salt Lake City is because a major part of it takes place in Utah, where let’s just say Mormons (as Doyle called them) do not emerge as heroes. No one rushed to buy “Route from Liverpool to Great Salt Lake Valley” after reading this one.
To counter that, Cherie produces an early edition of “City of the Saints,” the 1862 book written by English adventurer and travel writer (think Bill Bryson a century earlier) Sir Richard Burton, who, unlike his countryman A. Conan Doyle, personally visited Salt Lake City and, as Cherie points out, “wrote nicely about us.”
There’s lots more dealing with Utah’s interconnected roots with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including a well-preserved copy of “Manuscript Found,” the unpublished and unfinished manuscript written by Solomon Spaulding in the early 1800s that critics of the church contended Joseph Smith used as the basis for the Book of Mormon.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Special Collections: Where the old stuff never gets old – Deseret News
#2025 #America #Books #DeseretNews #FamilyHistory #History #Libraries #Library #PersonalHistory #Reading #Technology #UnitedStates #Utah #Writing
I went home again, back to where I once belonged, and wrote about what it means to paddle the river channel where I learned to love the outdoors and being on the water.
#memoir #memories #kayaking #paddling #kayak #upstateNY #UpstateNewYork #PersonalHistory
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