Daily Archives: August 6, 2020
Bombs Away . . .
Today, August 6th, is a very important date in my life for two reasons.
The first is the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima today in 1945.
As I’ve mentioned before, my mother was a Captain (later Major) in the Army Nurse Corp and she and her nurses were on a train for New Orleans from West Point to get on a troop ship to the Pacific to participate in the invasion of the Japanese homeland.
And with Japan’s propensity for attacking hospital ships there’s a very good chance she might not have made it home. After all, it was forecast that there would be over a million American casualties during a possible invasion.
And the second reason is that on this date 29 years ago Tim Berners-Lee.of the CERN Institute in Switzerland put up the very first website on what would become the World Wide Web.
You can read more about it further down the blog.
On this date in 2009 we were in Cape Cod, MA checking out where we lived in 1972 when I was working for the DOD at Otis AFB there.
August 6, 2009
We found it!
We spent our last day on Cape Cod driving around looking for the efficiency motel unit we stayed in here in 1972.
And we found it.
But the first time we had to do this morning was move. We only had our other site for 4 days and then someone else had it reserved. So we had to pack up and move down the road apiece from site 266 to site 2.
Actually this is a better site for us, because it’s a pull-thru and had room behind it for us to hook up the toad (truck) before we pull out tomorrow.
After getting hooked up, we headed out on our quest. And first we found the motel, or what’s left of it, that we stayed in for a few days when we first got here. Apparently it’s no longer a going concern.
Next we moved into an efficiency motel unit that had two bedrooms. We knew it was on the water, so we just kept checking likely areas, and there it was.
We didn’t remember the name, but now it’s called the Cape Wind Resort. The place has expanded and the cranberry bog behind it is gone, but the playground area out in front where Chris played is still here. Chris turned four while we were here, so he probably wouldn’t remember the place.
We only stayed here a month or so, because the rent would go from $100 a month in the winter to $400 a month once the tourist season started after Memorial Day. That’s when we moved into the house we found a few days ago.
It’s kind of amazing that all these places are still here after almost 40 years, but then they’ve got houses around here that were built in 1675, so I guess it’s not that amazing.
Coming home we ate dinner at a pretty decent Mexican place called Sam Diegos. Not bad.
And tomorrow it’s off to Woonsocket…
Thought For The Day:
Still true today.
“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” – Thomas Jefferson
In 2016 we were making a day trip over to Pensacola, FL from our stay in Gulf Shores, AL.
August 6, 2016
“Vague but exciting”
Another nice, quiet day here at Gulf Shores. We had a respite from the thunderstorms today, but they’re coming back with a vengeance the next few days, including 100% chance of Heavy Thunderstorms on Tuesday when we supposed to leave for north Alabama.
They have Wi-Fi here at Gulf State Park, and it appears to cover the entire area using repeater relays. In fact we have a repeater pole right outside our rig. Too bad it doesn’t work.
And it didn’t work last year either. When I ask then about the problem, I was only told they have Wi-Fi at the Activity Center. Well, to start with, I’m not parked by the Activity Center.
But what’s strange is that they’ve got the hard part done. I have 4 bars of signal here, and my systems will connect and then try to get an IP address. Which it where all it fails. It hangs there until it gives up and times out.
Which pretty much means that the system is not connected to the internet. So I don’t know if they put the system in and then decided that it was too expensive to pay for sufficient bandwidth to cover the park or what. Since we’re talking about the State Government running things, who knows.
About 2pm Jan and I did our yearly Pensacola run, mainly for two things. Sonny’s BBQ and Artesana Imports.
Sonny’s is one of our three favorite BBQ places – Rudy’s BBQ, Famous Dave’s BBQ, and Sonny’s BBQ, . Between the 3, we’ve got most of the US covered for good BBQ.
Rudy’s covers Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, and we’ve eaten at a number of locations in Texas, and as far west as Phoenix. Good Texas BBQ, Brisket, and Ribs.
Famous Dave’s covers much of the US, with locations in 36 states, as far west as California, as far north as North Dakota, Montana, and Illinois, and as far east as New York. Good Ribs, Brisket, and Hot Links. We first ate at a Famous Dave’s in Billings, MT with Mike and Janna Clark, and have eaten at a number of them around the country since then.
Sonny’s covers a large part of the south and the southeast, including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina, and we’ve been eating at various locations since the 70’s.
We always tried to eat at the Sonny’s in Pensacola when we’re in the area, so today was our chance.
The first thing we noticed was that since we were here two years ago, they’ve done a major remodeling, inside and out, really updating the look.
But the BBQ is as good as ever. Jan got her usual Sliced Pork Sandwich with Fries and BBQ Beans, and I got my usual Pork 3 Ways Platter.
With Ribs, Sliced Pork, and Pulled Pork, it covers all the bases. I got the BBQ Beans, and the Corn on the Cob. One thing I like about their Corn on the Cob is that it’s cooked in foil, and not boiled and then left in hot water so that it gets soggy.
Besides the great BBQ, another thing I like about Sonny’s is no wimpy iced tea glasses.
No, these are big, double-handed 32oz glasses, so I’m not constantly having them refilled.
After our great meal, we drove on in toward downtown Pensacola to visit Artesana Imports, a gift shop that we’ve been visiting since the 70’s. Jan always finds something she likes, and today’s find was a new seashell-based dish towel.
Always a great place to visit.
“Vague but exciting”.
This is what Mike Sendall, Tim Berners-Lee’s boss at CERN in Switzerland wrote on Lee’s proposal giving him permission to develop what we know today as the World Wide Web.
So, yes, one guy invented the Web, and, no, it wasn’t Al Gore.
It was Tim Berners-Lee.
“He wrote the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which outlined how information would travel between computers, and HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which was used to create the first web pages. “
And today, August 6th, is the 25th anniversary of when the very first website went live.
And you can still see the page here at its original address.
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
And here’s the very first web server sitting on Lee’s desk,
It was a NexT computer which had a note taped to the front that said: “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER DOWN”.
And it was almost a year later when the very first picture was published on the Web.
It’s a photo of a parody rock band made up of CERN employees.
I figure the 2nd photo was probably porn.
I got in this early enough that I remember when there was only about a dozen websites in the entire world, all of the them at universities and research facilities.
One thing to remember is that the Internet and the Web are not the same thing. The Web runs on the Internet.
The Internet came first, with the first commercial ISP’s coming online in the late 80’s, and consisted of Email, Newsgroups, and IRC Chat.
Of course direct dial-up services like CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, etc., had been around since the late 60’s, but there was little or no connectivity between them.
Email was pretty much what it is today, while Newsgroups were gathering areas for people to trade info on pretty much every hobby, interest, and perversion you can imagine. IRC Chat was the early version of today’s Instant Messaging.
There’s more info here:
So if it wasn’t for what happened 25 years ago, you wouldn’t be reading this.
Thought for the Day:
Life always offers a second chance. It’s called tomorrow.
