Slick site

I use MapMyRide to log and map my bicycle rides. They've recently updated the site to display a fly-over of my route. Pretty cool stuff! It's not 100% accurate, however. I rode on the Cherry Creek Trail toward the Mall; however, the site assumed I rode on Cherry Creek Drive. It's a minor nit that I can live with.

So who is danno?

Now that Hawaii Five-0 is back on the air, and 'Book 'em Danno!" returns to popular usage, I started getting questions about why I use danno as a handle in the virtual world.  We set the wayback machine to 1986, and your trusty scribe is completing his bachelor's degree in Computer Science.

I get a call from the CS lab manager about a local company looking to hire folks fresh out of college. They are expanding their software business, and were interested in programmers. The company, Microtech Solutions, is long gone. We delivered accounting software based on Progress Software's 4GL Database, selling AT&T UNIX-based servers. My first computer was an AT&T 3B2:

The company had a standard for issuing user id's: use the first three letters of your first name, and the first two letters of your surname. So: Dan Notov became danno. I liked the way it sounded, the reference to Hawaii Five-0, and the fact it is easy to remember. Whenever I create a login somewhere on the Internet, I usually employ a variation of danno.

So now I'm @Large

Welcome to my idle blog, Danno's @ Large. I started this page mostly as a curiosity about blogging, syndication and social media. However, I never actually posted anything here. So, after months of languishing among the dregs of the blogoshphere, here I am, ready to actually post some content.

Why @Large? Well, that's an interesting question. Go way back to the early days of the Internet, about 1993. I became friends with a gentleman with similar interests. We decided to start up a little consulting business to capitalize on people and businesses attempting to use this new medium. In a spark of genius, we decided to call ourselves, Consultants @ Large. So, why not register the domain Large.com? That way we could have cool e-mail addresses using @Large.com. Yes, it was all about vanity.

A few years later, we went our separate ways, and I kept the domain. Come 1997, I actually built a little Linux box using an old PC, sitting in the closet in my home office. Here is what my home page looked like back then. The website was called cowie.large.com, a nickname of my oldest niece.

Regular life intruded, and home-based web servers became difficult and costly to maintain, so I outsourced the site to a an e-mail provider, Entergroup. Nowadays, it lives on as a subscription-based vanity e-mail service. Want to be @Large? Then sign up...