Now that Google has released an updated groups.google.com view — I decided to check it out last night. It also looks like that have a far more complete record of Usenet postings than I remember having them last.
For all the warnings about Facebook and privacy to keep the Youth of America from posting stupid pictures of themselves in Facebook or Myspace or whatever — all I can say is “been there, done that” — only in Usenet.
I wrote some awfully embarrassing stuff. Sheesh. Not that I had half a brain when I was in college (not that I have half a brain now) — but wow.
One, I apparently was actually pulling for UNC Chapel Hill in 1993 while posting to alt.fan.jimmy-buffet. Embarrassing.
Two, in protest of some telecommunications bill — where it was rumored that the bill was going to outlaw all discourse on abortion (it wasn’t — but this was pre-Thomas-on-the-web, and I was just reading half-baked media reports, not the actual bill). So in order to practice civil disobedience — I launched into some diatribe about abortion. While I certainly was vociferously in favor of free speech and the right to debate publicly any and all ideas (and thankfully still am that way) — and that’s really at the core what my post was about — I was also at the time a pseudo-brainwashed evangelical right-winger (which thankfully I’m not any longer). Highly embarrassing. (and stupid). There’s a whole lot in life that can’t be boiled down to binary positions and I cringe ever time I think or read my own past binary thoughts on that and similar issues.
They still don’t have the post where I bitched out Timo Salmi in defense of me illegally using Turbo Pascal because I was a poor college student that couldn’t afford the software (actually I had a legal copy of TP, but not wordperfect I don’t think). So maybe there are still some mysteries buried out there.
Ah, usenet. Ah. college.