• Summer 1996

    This is the one that started it all. It was the dawn of the World Wide Web and Sun had just introduced Java to a bewildered world. While Java was still proving itself to enterprise computing, most people were introduced to it with lots of unnecessary little applets like the ones here, some of which don't even work anymore. I thought that HTML frames would be a great way to divide up the sections of the pages despite my friend Curt Harpold's admonition that "frames are evil". It turned out that he was right after all. The babies section was put in to showcase the baby boom that was going on with all of my married friends and hopefully generate some traffic to my site (which it did!).

  • Winter 1996

    By the summer of 1996, UVa buddies Paul Boyer and Andy Rutherford had had their first babies, and were bringing them along to summertime events like the one here at Wolf Trap. My other good UVa buddy Alan Weiss married his girlfriend Kim in Annapolis. And, never one to say die, I struggled with the HTML frames structure in the site and figured that navigation would work best if I included explicit "forward" and "backward" buttons on the pages. OK, Curt, you were right!

  • Summer 1997 and Holidays 1997

    In 1997 I spent a great summer with new friend Joanne and I spent the holidays partying it up with UVa buddies and spending time with the family. I also decided that the WS(N) needed a new look so I finally got rid of the frames and developed the page layout that the site had for many years to follow. You will also notice the snarky reference to "Internet Exploder" at the bottom of the page: the browser wars were raging at the time and Sun was in a firmly anti-Microsoft mood.

  • Winter 1998, Summer 1998, and Holidays 1998

    This was the first time I really tried to do a quarterly, or at least seasonal, update to my web site. I also wanted to capture some of the fine recipes that my every-few-months Dinner Club was making, but unfortunately no one else contributed so it didn't last long. Around the summer, I decided that the logo I used on the masthead was pretty juvenile at this point, so I came up with a new one, thus starting what would become a lifelong love affair with PhotoShop.

  • Special 2000 Millenium Edition

    OK, so doing quarterly updates to the site didn't quite work out ;-) But I did a fairly nice 1999 year in review and was by now including a lot more scuba pictures. This time we celebrated Curt Hapold and Ray Voight's new boat, the Field Office, and Dave Edstrom's 40th birthday. The site took on a navigation panel on the left-hand side, which I created with a Java program that generated such things for Sun's internal websites. Hey, it was free.

  • 2001

    This year saw UVa buddy Jack Mayo's 40th birthday, other UVa buddy Andy Rutherford's annual summer party, and still otherUVa buddy Paul Boyer's annual paintball outing. We also welcomed baby Wahoos Luke Boyer and Jeff McLean, Jr. By now, I had moved my web, mail, and FTP hosting in-house to a new Sun Ultra 5 workstation. Later, I also figured that the old wspot.com didn't really fit (I'm not a company, after all), I changed everything to wspot.net, where it has stayed to this day.

  • 2003

    This was another overhaul of the look and feel of the site, which I hoped would make things like a little cleaner. I was still figuring out how to do web, mail, and file hosting with the open source infrastructure that I still use today. This was also the first edition that used CSS, which was just starting to gain popularity.

  • Winter 2005

    I took a stab at doing a scrapbook of some of my favorite pictures in my life, but never really finished fleshing it out. Much later, in 2013, I finally began getting some of those old photos on the site.

  • Winter 2006

    2006 was the tenth anniversary of the website. It had really come a long way since the beginning!

  • Spring 2007

    Another update to the look and feel of the site, if only just superficially. CSS-based navigation menus and tabs were getting very popular, and I wanted to try my hand.

  • 2008

    In 2008, I took the plunge and sprang for the entire Adobe Creative Suite, which meant I could go nuts with PhotoShop and design my site using Dreamweaver. This is the first stab a whole new layout for the WS(N), still based on the traditional color scheme.

  • 2009

    2009 saw a radical new color scheme for the WS(N), and Internet speeds were now making it possible for me to host my scuba videos. Since there was still no real Internet standard for web-based video, I resorted to Flash for both the videos and the photo galleries that you see scattered throughout the site.

  • 2013

    But then in late 2012, I decided to "take a couple of weeks" and really overhaul the site which hadn't been touched in years. After all, Facebook was now my preferred way of keeping in touch with my friends and family! But I was doing more and more videos and various restrictions on size and content on YouTube led me to take advantage of the developing HTML5 standards for video and the amazing possibilities with CSS3 for stylizing the site. The "couple of weeks" wound up being about seven months, but I was very happy with the final result. I had been meaning to make a lot of the photos and videos available for years.