(Another Rick Archer note:
1999 was my "Welcome to the Internet" Year.
One of my favorite sayings is "Experience is a comb life throws you
after you lose your hair." Well, I lost a lot of hair that year.)
Here's a story for you:
SSQQ, One of Houston's leading Houses of Ill Repute
Well, in a nutshell, SSQQ for five days was almost listed
as one of Houston's leading houses of ill repute. It is an interesting story caused by a couple of the jokes that were sent to
me.
Here is what happened. On Sunday, May 9, I was putting the finishing touches on the Joke
Page to name the winner's of the April joke contest plus the updates for the May contest. I
decided this certain very clever joke from Hieronymous Anonymous definitely should be
included. Unfortunately it involved the Church, drug use, and sex. But it was funny.
In fact, it was very funny.
Now my daughter Sam has been reading the joke page for some time. To print or not to
print. So I decided to print a secret page. Easier said than done. Finally I found a way to hide
a page in a secret place, but in order to really disguise it, I had to make a change to
the very top to get of the final link.
Without even a clue as to the consequences, I erased
everything up top (e.g. where this page says "scuttlebutt" plus two bubbles) and
named my secret joke page "The Blue Side of Town". Then I hit "Save".
I wondered why my computer took 3 minutes for a two-second save. Then to my horror I
discovered the answer. All of my web site's 100 pages had been renamed "The Blue Side
of Town". Oh great. Marvin Zindler, Eyewitness News ! Tonight's lead
story..."a well known Houston dance studio revealed today the real reasons behind its
phenomenal success..."
No big deal. I will switch it back. No go. This thing will not reverse. I spent an hour
looking through the manual and the help page. I cannot redo it. So I called David
Schroeder, the man who designed my web site (click here for David's business page in
our Affiliates section). After 10 minutes on the phone, still no luck reversing the
problem. Then I bring my computer to the studio on Monday night. Still no luck; David
can't fix it. So on Tuesday, I take my computer to his house.
Four hours later we still have not fixed the problem. In the meantime though I can not
publish any updates or my entire studio will become the Blue Side. Not the Dark Side. Not
the Far Side. Just the Blue Side of Town.
Wednesday I have a brain storm. Why not reinsert from a zip disk some files from a month
back that were not corrupted, then transfer my new data where necessary ? This process led
to another discovery that solved the problem.
But after all the work trying to solve the problem, I ended up splitting my web page into
three separate parts : Current Information, Background Information, and Archives. So for a
while many of the hyperlinks will be fuzzy till I have a chance to clean things up.
And that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
This enormous headache forced me to redo the entire web page. For a while, many of the
links will be a complete mess till I can clean everything up.
I might add that one week after my original mistake that
forced me to split the web site into three locations, I erased one third of my web site
completely on Saturday, May 15. I spent all day Saturday and Sunday correcting it,
but I think my patch job turned out okay for the most part. I am however certain there are
some loose ends.
Feel free to report any missing links and we ain't talking
abominable snowmen either.
The point of this
story was that this incident plus a bad case of the "Happy 99 New
Year" virus cost me my first three months of data from 1999.
So if something exciting happened to you like getting married or
something equally as interesting, send it in and I will patch up
this three months of ssqq missing history a little bit.
RA 01-14-2006
