Monthly Archives: June 2006

Tales of the Old Skool 1: The David Hasselhoff Experience

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While I’m doing this celebrating-10-years thing, I though I’d better tell the tale of the David Hasselhoff Experience, lest it be lost to the interweb forever.

My website had been up and running for a month and I was bored. I’d learned this new HTML thing and wanted a new project, so I decided to make a fan site for David Hasselhoff. It’s not that I was a fan of the Hass, but rather I saw his cultural significance.

I went to some search engines and gathered all the Hasselhoff-related links I could find, grabbed a few images and made a website called The David Hasselhoff Experience. (Readers may recall the New Zealand rock group The Hasselhoff Experiment. Hm, I wonder where they got their name from.)

One of the first things I did was submit The Hasselhoff Experience (or DHX) to the then hugely popular Yahoo directory. There was no Entertainment/Actors/Hasselhoff_David, so I had to request that Yahoo create it, and they did. A few years later, this became the most popular Yahoo category.

Within a few hours of the listing going up, I had a massive 50 hits. Soon, my Hasselhoff website became more popular than my personal site. It was a hub for all things Hasselhoff. I was even contacted by the guys who ran the official Pamela Anderson website saying they were going to link to me.

I started getting emails. The senders were either people who, despite disclaimers, thought they were emailing David Hasselhoff and wanted autographs, photos or to express their undying love; or people who thought I was somehow mocking David Hasselhoff and making money from it. (Note: This was in the days of the interweb bubble, where it was somehow logical to think that someone could make serious cash from a David Hasselhoff fansite. If only!)

Occasionally – very occasionally – I’d get an email from someone who understood the intent of the DHX. It was the same spirit that’s fuelled the ‘Hoff-mania that’s recently swept Australia, the popularity of the Hooked on a Feeling video, and Mr Hasselhoff’s ability to bring added value to a film with a mere cameo appearance.

But eventually I got sick of the DHX. The crazy fans were still emailing me (“Dear KttnLvr45. I am not David Hasselhoff. Regards, Robyn.”) and I was getting sick of it. I’d found direction with my own website and wanted to work on that, so the David Hasselhoff Experience came to an end.

I didn’t get any emails of complaint. Hasselhoffmania continued on the internet without my help. It seems to be a force more powerful than even Mr Hasselhoff himself.

Stay tuned! On Thursday I bring you the tale of the Horseboy email. It goes all the way back to 1995 and involves a hobby horse, Marcus Lush, and a historically significant email.

10 Years

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Right about now, mid-June, is the 10th anniversary of… actually, I’m not sure what of. What I do know is that in mid-June, 1996, I uploaded the very first version of my website.

I’d got online in about September 1995 and I’d been an admirer of the websites of people like Justin Hall and the dudes at Suck.com. I’d just switched to a new ISP – Wave – that offered 20MB web hosting in its pricing plan. HTML seemed pretty easy, so I decided to make one of those web page things.

I furiously tested it; checking each and every link to make sure everything worked before I uploaded it. Finally “Robyn’s Page of Various Assorted Stuff” was ready to go. The URL was something like www.wave.co.nz/pages/rhg

In the first few months, I kept redesigning the website. As I got to know more HTML, I was able to make it look how I wanted. I kept changing the name too. “Robyn’s Page of Various Assorted Stuff” became “Summer”, then “Disco Bitch”. (Shut up. I was only 21.)

I had a section of my website called The Secret Passage where I kept stuff I’d written. It was so named because originally it was a secret part of the website, with hidden links. But I liked the name, and renamed my website “Robyn’s Secret Passage”. No sexual innuendo intended – I just didn’t want to hide under a pseudonym. Eventually I got tired of redesigning, and “Robyn’s Secret Passage” stayed.

After about a year I moved to Ihug and transferred my website there, and crash.ihug.co.nz/~rhg was my new home. In 1998 I decided to get a domain name. secretpassage.com was taken, but secret-passage.com was available, so that became my new web address, and eventually hosting was moved to wibble.net.

I just kept adding to it and culled very little. Back in the early days of the web, there was a vogue for “under construction” graphics on websites, showing that the site was incomplete; that there was still more to come. But I read someone saying that a good website should always be under construction; it shouldn’t be a complete, static, never-changing experience, so I kept that in mind.

I redesigned my website a few times, but it got trickier to do. In the beginning I’d have only a dozen pages to change, but as my HTML empire grew, it was dozens of pages that would need updating.

In late 2002 I started writing stuff at LiveJournal. It hadn’t really been my intention to switch to LiveJournal as my place for online writing, but it was just so much easier than the old system of uploading stuff by FTP, and people could comment on and discuss my posts. I knew something had changed when people started linking to my LiveJournal site over my old website.

So I guess I’m celebrating 10 years of writing stuff and putting it on my parts of the internet.

Sometimes it feels a bit lonely writing online, but every now and then I hear from people who say they were inspired by my website to go and do their own thing. Y’know, there weren’t a lot of New Zealanders out there doing stuff online in the early days. I even had some of my writing used as course material in a first-year English paper at Auckland Uni. Not bad for a non-graduate.

It’s been a choice 10 years. Here’s to 10 more.

Reality

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The biggest load of crap that has come out of the Auckland power cut discussion is the idea that this somehow proves that New Zealand is actually a Third World country.

For example, there’s this quote in the Herald today from Heart of the City (Auckland CBD retailers association) CEO Alex Swney.

“Rather than try and second-guess the cost in dollars and cents, the big picture is what has it done for Auckland’s reputation as a first-world city?” he said. “Are we heading for Sydney or Suva?”

So a North American, who’d been through the massive 2003 power cut that affected proper, grown-up cities like New York, Detroit and Toronto, would look at Auckland’s power cut and decide that Auckland was up there with cities in Haiti and Niger?

It’s more like Auckland suffered an significant power cut, as all places with electricity do from time to time. It inconvenienced both people and businesses, but it speaks volumes that the biggest complaint that most people seem to have is that they weren’t able to get any coffee during the power cut. Try getting a decent latte in somewhere reasonably all right, like Samoa, let alone Sierra Leone.

A bit of a day

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I woke up this morning at about 8.30, except I didn’t know what the time was because my clock radio screen was blank. After making sure it wasn’t my fault (power bill – paid; fuses – all present and accounted for), I rang Vector. I knew something was up when instead of getting through to Vector, I got the overloaded recording from TelstraClear.

So I grabbed my watch off the coffee table (8.47) and went back to bed and slept until later in the morning. (I’m not a lazy-arse, I’m still a bit illin’.)

By noon I decided to get out of bed and get in the shower. Fortunately I had plentiful hot water, but unfortunately I still couldn’t wash my hair because my hair dryer was inoperable and I didn’t want to sit around with wet hair.

I went for a walk down to the Mt Eden shops and discovered most of them were shut. But I was enticed by the candlelit Time Out bookshop, so I wandered in and saw that Douglas Coupland’s latest novel, JPod was in store, so I bought it with a manual Visa payment. The lady behind the counter had never used the zip-zap machine before, but I reminded her that if it was good enough for our forefathers in the ’80s, it’s good enough for us today.

I was due to start work at 2.30, and for a while it looked like I might not have to go in, but sure enough the power came back on and I was called to the office.

I made another visit back down to the shops. The lights were on at the bank, but no one was inside. “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog” was blasting from inside a fully lit cafe, but no one was in it. It was rather spooky.

“It’s been a bit of a day,” said to the taxi driver on the way home from work. Indeed it has. Checking my email just now, I found a spam with the randomly generated subject line, “You never miss the water till the well runs dry.”

The finals, finally

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I’ve spent the last few day on the couch with a box of Kleenex aloe vera tissues, sneezing and coughing and generally feeling awful. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to make it to the 48Hours Auckland final, but I decided that it wouldn’t really be much different from sitting on the couch watching DVDs, and after all, laughter is the best medicine.

So with pseudoephedrine, antibiotics, cough syrup and cough lozenges a go-go, made it to the Civic, and managed to horrify Andy who is germphobic. He refused to sit next to me, but Jeremy, F:Rad’s director of photography offered to swap places. “Thanks for making me feel like a lepper, Andy,” I said.

The evening got underway and the 12 finalists were shown, and then the winners were announced. The runner-up was Arthaus, which I love so much, so I’m really glad it was recognised. The winner was Brown Peril: The Tim Porch Story, which was so funny and clever that it shocked many teams.

But what about Fractured Radius? Did team F:Rad win anything? Actually, we did. We won the award for Best Use of Line, which honours the team who most skilfully incorporated the compulsory line, “That is what I’m talking about,” into their film. We do pride ourselves on innovative use of the compulsory elements. While most teams used the line to mean the same as “Hell yeah!”, we came up with this award-winning gem:

Julia: You’ll never get away with this. Robin and Bruce will rescue me.
General: I’m counting on it. It’ll be the end of Three Heroes Against Terror.
Donna Matrix: As well as the end of T.H.A.T.
General: You fool! T.H.A.T is what I’m talking about!

It’s been a really fun fortnight. I can’t wait till 48Hours 2007.