1997

By 1997 I was thouroughly jaded. Living in Cedar Rapids and having to deal with the student population of Coe College was getting to me. I felt like a lone beacon of individualism in a sea of homogeneity. Sure I was a smart guy, perhaps smarter than most. And that made me arrogant. And pissed. And it showed in my writing. I began publishing a column in the school newspaper, mostly about how much various aspects of Coe sucked. Computer Services, student government, greek life, you name it, I was annoyed by it. I tried to write once essay a week to vent my anger and I published them all together in a collection I called "Bombast." While some of the writing here is terrible, and much of it is no longer in-tune with my beliefs, I did like the back-end I wrote for the project that lets readers vote on their favorite stories and rank them.

Bombast

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While I was stewing in my own vitriol, one source of amusement for me was my neighbor Shaun. Sometime during the spring of 1997 he started telling me about all of his calamities involving his possesions. I found his life to be so humorous that I made a little tribute website for him.

The Shaun Page

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It was about this time when the first dHTML-enabled web browsers started coming out. I took a brief foray into the dHTML coding world and created an almost-working game of Pong. Not the greatest emulator ever, but it works for the first ball or so. Then there's a timing issue of some kind and the ball goes nuts. But whatever... [actually on most modern browzers this no longer works at all. Sorry]

dHTML Pong

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Back to being angry... one of my biggest qualms during 1997 was the prevalance of religious zealots at Coe and the strange lack of atheist zealots. I decided that it was my job to bring balance to the force. I was going to make a big atheism webpage, but the effort petered out for some reason. All that ever ended up on the web [aside from the essays in Bombast regarding religion] was this funny graphic and some quotes:

Atheism