January 1st, 2010
Just getting something here for now.
January 4th, 2010
Getting over being ill for the New Year but wanted to make sure I got something here on the 1st. Rather weak start the the site, but I'll try to improve on that.
This site will hold little value for most coming here. I wanted to leave this first year in this chronological order as many people may want to skip a lot of the background information about me and just jump to later months. I have been meaning for a long time to start to catalouge much of my old web pages, designs, code and generally stuff I fould useful or funny over the years.
I owned this domain over 10 years ago, let it lapse after a couple years, and finally got it back after the seach engine it was linking to let it expire. I have been creating code in one form or another since 1993 and much of it has been lost already, so I'd like to save what I still have somewhere besides an old CD-Rom.
This site has been designed using a basic layout I had for a site called Karmarc awhile back and is in no way a very "pretty" design from an HTML standpoint.
It is thrown together TABLE layout with a few spashes of CSS thrown in and is coded to work on 1280 pixel resolutions or wider setups at the moment. If you have to scroll, sorry. I can guarantee you that if you are reading these words six months to a year down the road, the site looks nothing like it did to start (but I'll be sure to document the changes along the way).
I hold no illusions that most coming here have no idea who I am and may just be strolling through. Pardon any mispellings, grammatical garbage or the occasional screen problem. I'll be working on them over time - right now it is important to me to start trying to get some old content of mine on here and documented more for my own piece of mind than for anyone else.
That said, welcome.
January 5th, 2010
One of the first viable programs I ever made was a Visual Basic application for connecting to old Bulletin Board Systems called ezCom. I originally wrote it in 1995 under the name DesignTyme but the source has been lost (or on an old CD I haven't looked through yet) and it serves no purpose anymore.
I did a small rewrite in 1996 I released it, along with ezUUE - a program for encoding and decoding UUE messages, on AOL and on my own website called Shaggymane Freeware.
 Andy, a friend I worked with at Prince George's Community College at the time, created a little snail with a rocket on his back to go with the mushroom based website. I still think that snail he made was my favorite part of the site and to this day makes me smile.
January 11th, 2010
In 1998 I was coming off a divorce and looking to make a change in jobs when the stars aligned and my father and I decided to start a business together. He had been running an amatuer radio business for many years and sales had started to slow with the internet picking up steam and the weather software he had written was starting to sell and we decided it was a good time to start moving a lot of the weather information being gathered by WeatherNode to an online pressence.
Xenocode, Inc. was born in 1998 as a place to sell weather software, hardware and produce a web entity to showcase the real-time weather collection capabilities of the WeatherNode software. As the web side of the business grew, we developed the domain for WeatherGuys.com as a place to update live weather information, while at the same time emailing live warnings to anyone who wanted them. All of these services we paid for with advertising dollars, and through 2000, this source of income allowed the business to prosper.
In 2001, the bottom fell out of the internet advertising model and we decided to shut down operations while we were still solvent. The two of us have discussed many times how this time was a wonderful period of development and job enjoyment. There is a strong possibility that we will revisit some of this older code in the near future and we are both looking forward to that.
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