Tag: nostalgia

If there was flickr in the 90s, I would’ve favorited this photo.

The funny thing about this photo is that it was taken on September 18, 1996. It’s my birthday! Happy birthday, BrowserMetrics! You’re 25!

Now take a look at who’s helping me to celebrate. They are co-workers from Ruby’s, fellow servers. For my last birthday, it was just my family. I can’t believe that I had celebrated a birthday not with family. It’s been a long time.

The other aspect of this photo is that the girl I was crushing hard on at the time is also there to celebrate it as well. That’s why I’m ducking out of the picture. This can’t be real. Someone pinch me. The problem though is that I was a drunk at the time. So it was hard to figure out what happened on this night.

When I pulled this photo off the floppy, I didn’t know any of these facts. I had to search my memory for it. I had to look at the date on the files just to be sure that I had the right year. This time of my life is a drunken blur. I must’ve been having too good of a time to chronicle it. And yet I wish I had.

Currently, I like to chronicle my life with social media. Blogs, flickr, twitter are all contributing to making my memories indexable by google. Yet, these formative years of my twenties weren’t and they make it a big, black hole. So I look at this photo, and smile as it’ll help me recover them.

Here’s how I think the night happened. Drinks at the Harryman House. More drinks at one of these guys’ house. Passed out drunk. What a birthday! As I look back on it, I wish I wasn’t a drunk and I had put the moves on that girl. Some things are still the same with me.

So what I have here is an artifact of funness, something which I’ve been missing these last few months. I’ve been in a funk. I just need to get my drunk on and just have a good time. Like that bastard in the photo.

Remember this? I had promised a few posts related to these pictures in which I look back to who I was back then. Before doing so I want to get into the technology of these pictures, because it struck me as funny as to how far computing has progressed. And it was in thinking of how old these photos were that made me realize that even though I am in these pictures that person is not anything like the me of today and neither is the technology.

You already know I pulled these pictures from a 3/4″ floppy disk, but you don’t know that they were formatted as a gif file. That’s funny because the best way to store pictures onto storage media would be jpg. Why are they gifs? Who in their right mind would scan photos into gif files. What year is it again?! I remember when and where I got these photos scanned. It was a camera store in Hunt Valley by the Giant, and according to the time stamps of the files, they were created on Saturday, October 12, 1996. That’s just about 14 years ago, when the Internet was barely walking, the floppy drive was the favorite removable storage media, Windows 95 was within its year of release, and you didn’t own a scanner. Plus, cameras were still using film.

Look at it today, October 4, 2010. Our storage media contain 1000 times more floppy disks. The Internet is in its unruly teens. I don’t care anymore about Windows 95, because OS X kicks its ass, and Apple still rulez. I have a scanner and could scan those analog film pictures on my own into jpg files if I wanted. And my camera is pure digital.

We change. So does technology. What happens when we try to go back? It becomes somewhat of a hassle because things may not be compatible anymore. All the trouble to update outdated things, is it worth it?