We can now say goodbye to Geocities.  It will go black at the end of October.  In its hay-day, it was much maligned by techies, and probably for good reason — even if one basic thrust of their problem has that sort of elitism that didn’t take into account a desire on the public not to become computer techies themselves.  Geocities misfired on a couple of occassions — a noxious little watermark, and then at the acquisition from Yahoo a claim of corporate copyright over everything anyone posted.  In retrospect, Yahoo’s purchase of geocities was probably an unwise investment, a flush down the toilet of some millions of dollars, though it made sense at the time — geocities reportedly was the third most hit site on the web at one time.  Geocities could have been something, had it evolved with the Internet Zietgist — on to something paralleling any blogger or facebook, but it didn’t evolve.  So it was a relic, by-passed.  The thing lacked any dynamic features, encouraging a great deal of inaction and abondonment, and thus languishes its users into obscurity.

I liked, or at least adapted a liking, to the neighborhood subdivision inherent in the sub-directorys for the web addresses.  “SoHo” “Coffeehouse” “7115”.  What an address!  It gave me a bit of amusement in “looking around the neighborhood”, where I found a lot of unused websites — people figuring putting up a website of their own was the thing to do, and then not doing anything with it.  Lack of dynamism.

Then again… the subdirectories of these address… and an inability to communicate it to Law Enforcement… all on their end, I have to say… appeared to foster a feeling that I wasn’t playing things straight with them, which is never a good thing to engender with figures of Authority.

I stood at the entrance of the police station, whisked off of my high school campus after a brief and horrifying little chat, and the officer asked, “What’s the address?”  And I answered.

“dubba u dubba u dubba u dot geocities dot com slash SoHo slash Coffeehouse slash seventy-one fifteen slash diddley dash doot dot h t m l.”
I don’t know what he was expecting, but he couldn’t quite process such a thing.  After a short pause, he rustled about for a notepad and a pen, handed them to me, and asked “Could you write that down?”  Which I did.  And, after a pause, he parked me to the little holding cell, only convenient place available to dispose of me.

A minute later, he came back.  Unlocked the door.  Handed me the paper.  “This is… the right address?”
I looked at the paper.  Saw that everything was in order.  Handed in back, nodding my head, “Yep!”
 He handed it back, saying “Are you sure?”  I looked down again.  Grabbed my pen (which I had been impulsively clicking for the duration of this police visit), drew three lines above the “C” in “Coffeehouse” and “S” and “H” in “SoHo”, and handed it back. 
“It’s … um… Case Sensitive.”
Huh.

He returned in a minute.  Opened the door.  Summoned me.  And asked, “Why don’t you… um… come back with me and type it yourself?”
In retrospect, there probably wasn’t too much harm in having me do so in the first place.  But there was no protocol for this, so the police was in a very real way was playing this in an ad hoc manner.  As it were, I entered the office.  Another officer, the other’s Superior I presume, rolled his seat back, and let me lean over with just enough room to type the address on his keyboard.  There was a false start in getting the page up as it clicked to one of the barely wrong addresses he had been typing in to no avail, and so came a stern and accusatory question — “Why don’t you type in the address that you actually use to get to your page?” — which was answered by the page coming up.  I was ushered back out so they could apprise the situation anew.

It turned out all right, of course.  Me?  Not a Serial Killer.  Good to know!  But I am trying to imagine how these things might work in this day and age.  I don’t know. Do schools make it a point to survelliance their students’ Internet accumulations?  (Quick google search.  Around here?)  And how does one answer the question of handing an address for a long-gone facebook post — isn’t that a bunch of “&”s and random numbers and “^”s, something a bit more confusing than three slashes, three upper-case letters, and a dash (which, I suppose, everyone is used to by now).

Anyway, cue Mountain Goats.  And fade to black.

Any good geocities pages out there?  I can think of two.  Kind of.

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