The good old days

By Todd Stadler · Monday, January 29, 2001 12:36am

And now a moment of self-indulgence masked as a recollection...

I remember the day Chris Gouge said I was a genius. Actually, it was Jenny Lee who told me he thought that. That was back when she and I talked. Chris thought I was a genius for using HTML tables to align my text and my images on a page I'd written about my first college spring break trip. He thought I was so clever for doing that. Really, I'd stolen the idea by looking at someone else's HTML code, of course. That's how I learned everything back then. I couldn't tell Chris, though. He was too busy thinking I was a genius. He had plenty of time to learn otherwise.

As cool as the web has gotten since that day long ago, I do miss the ability to impress people using as simple a construct as an HTML table. Nowadays there's a hundred different ways to serve flashy, yet vacuous content (or lack thereof) to the masses. It makes me wistful. I am full of wists.