Blog

This month marks the tenth anniversary of my website. I registered mattbrundage.com in early 2003, but the site had existed for three years prior at the now-defunct geocities.com.

I'm stopping short of providing a gallery of screen shots of my site through the years, but this I can tell you: the site gets progressively less embarrassing as time goes by. But even in rare instances when the design wasn't half-bad, the underlying code was — by current standards — atrocious. A few examples:

• I didn't specify a doctype declaration, with the reasoning that I was keeping the page weight low. For similar reasons, or perhaps out of sheer laziness, I didn't always enclose attribute values in double quotes. Doh! Both of these heinous practices ended in 2004.
• In lieu of server-side file includes, I was using JavaScript includes simply to output common navigation menus on the page. In some parts of the site, this practice persisted until 2007. 2007!
• I didn't start validating my code until the summer of 2004, around the time that I started using Firefox. And yes, my site was "broken" when I first viewed it in Firefox, then on version 0.8 or 0.9.
• I was declaring font sizes in points rather than "em"s or percentages as late as 2005.
• I would sometimes separate paragraphs with two <br> tags instead of wrapping them in <p> tags. This practice finally ended site-wide in 2007.
• I didn't even start indenting my code at any discernible frequency until late 2007 — it was a conscious decision to keep the page weight as low as possible.

I feel as if I have finally absolved myself of past web development sins. The only real bright spot in my early code seems to be my wholehearted embrace of CSS.

Since moving to Silver Spring in 2005, I've walked approximately 1,568 miles to and from the Forest Glen Metro Station. That's about 490 hours of walking.

Despite my ardent Catholic faith, I have never been confirmed. This is even more astounding when you consider that the sacrament of confirmation is a prerequisite to the sacrament of marriage.

I've been using Quicken on a daily basis since October 1, 1993. I just recently persuaded Annie to join me and now she is all excited.

I've made 12,033 edits (and counting) to the English version of Wikipedia. An average of more than one edit per day since birth.

Circa 2001 or 2002, I was scrounging around in the music section of a used book store — trying to find an LP or 45 with the song "Go Away Little Girl" by Steve Lawrence. Randomly, I struck up a conversation with the man standing next to me; I got to telling him what I was trying to find. Turns out the man was Steve Lawrence's cousin or something. The Odds! I was too astonished to react appropriately, so I muttered something cursory like, "oh, wow, that's cool." The mind boggles when I try to calculate the odds of something like that ever happening. To anyone. Ever again.