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Well, that was a fun decade!

Hello September 2020...

According to the time stamp, the last update to this page was in January 2008. So now, a mere 12 years and 8 months later, it's time to dust off the cobwebs and think about a content refresh. Just in case there are any die-hard fans that have been regularly checking on the site, the tipson.net has been in constant use in the intervening period, in order to keep @tipson.net emails working. But it's fair to say that the content hasn't kept up with reality.

A brief update

When this page was last updated, CSS was new, as were smart phones and electronic commerce. Clearly, a lot has changed. The previous version of this site was created via some Frankenstein combination of Photoshop, PHP, CSS and Javascript. To be honest, I still like the overall aesthetic, although the maintainability factor is unfortunately low (e.g. changing the "version" number in the top right image will require some serious archeological excavation).

Meanwhile, in the real world the Tipson family has gained two new members (hello Isaac and Annabelle!), representing a very healthy 100% growth rate from the two existing members as at January 2008. The new members joined us in Sydney, where we lived after moving back from Switzerland. We also have a cousin in New York, and many friends in the Bay Area, after living there for 4.5 years post Sydney. We have just now arrived in New Zealand, for our next adventure.

A digression (new content!)

I have finally uploaded the Story of the Mount Rainier Climb. Enjoy the content, but please forgive the formatting. I spent quite some time putting together a Word doc that I could publish as a physical book (extremely limited edition :-) ). I thought that it would then be a relatively simple matter to "Save As" a webpage, in Word. Unfortunately, and I really should have known better, it actually took a fair bit of hacking to present the halfway decent work product that you see before you. Still a lot faster than starting from scratch,though!

Future musings

The purposes of this web site used to be clear: a place to record periodic musings, interesting historical items, and sharing photos. All of these purposes have been superseded by blogging sites, social networking and cloud services, means that this site is now searching for a purpose. Or maybe not? There is something nice about artisanal HTML, bespoke CSS, hand-crafted Javascript.

To emphasise the point: I am typing this on a text editor. A text. Editor. And I am inserting HTML tags, and occasionally forgetting to add a < >. There is no doubt that the web world has moved on, that very few people still create websites like this, and that it'd be crazy to try and create any half-functional website via this method. But it's nice to how do it. And who knows? Maybe I will come full circle, and craft this site into commons that I first imagined.

Until then, if you have stumbled here, then welcome. Given the year that 2020 has been, it may be a nice dose of nostalgia to immerse yourself in the world of 2008, when things were different. I emphatically say "different", and not "better" or "simpler", because I remain optimistic about the future, and in the collective power of our better angels to bring about a better world. And anyway, who wants to be the kind of person that prefers the past over the future? Not me, that's for sure.

Shaun
Auckland, Sepetmber 2020

 


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