Hi Monty! I'm positively blushing at your description of me. I've
missed you too, man. Helloooo! Helloooo!
Sadly, modesty must kick in. I was
not
one
of
the
first
webmasters (mkgray and others were there first at MIT), and
www.mit.edu was only one of the first 100 websites. I also
was not the most technically astute person involved then,
although I now know all the protocols and technology
intimately. I do remember using ed (the standard text
editor) to do things on the server, because the load was at
14. I remember Plexus. I remember when Netscape was a new
thing.
I don't particularly feel like
a "Master"
yet
either...
I think I still need to first pass through the stage of
whining about not going to Toshi Station
to get power converters... ;)
On another note, DSL installation
was a
nightmare.
First, we had to locate a working pair in the building's
ancient phone switch. Then into the basement of
a neighboring building looking for an actual non-noisy pair
back to the CO. Then on to the roof wiring from the local
box to my apartment. All of this in pouring rain. Total
time: 4 hours. Fun. Still, nothing that can't be made
better by sushi (mmmm, Sandobe)
Today, it's still raining. When it's
like
this
outside, I'm always gripped by the
desire to put on a trenchcoat and traipse around Chinatown
pretending I'm in Bladerunner, but I'll let it pass.
Addendum. I am a little bit confused by the
web
of trust here. As has been observed by others, the one here
is starting to correspond more to personal
relations than to contributions to open source software.
I'm a prime example (can I really think of myself as a
Master?). This
doesn't really weaken my faith in a PGP web of trust, since
that only measures personal relations. It does however lead
me to wonder how effective it is to leverage webs of trust
to calculate other metrics (like the one here). Maybe it
works in most cases, but there is always a potential for
error.
As a related example, Google has the same problem.
It
doesn't boost the "best" pages, but merely the most popular
(in terms of linkages). Often times, these two different
notions coincide, but there could potentially be cases
where the "most popular" and "best" are radically divergent.
Maybe the number of votes should be factored in. I
only
have 2 outside ratings. But now I am a Master. The reason
is that a lot of people have approved xiphmont as a Master,
so he can singlehandedly grant Masterhood status to
anybody. Is this a problem with applying webs of trust to
change permissions and abilities? Should anything be done
about that?