Decade Flashback Day

Ten years ago, in July 2005...

• I was living here in the same house in Sterling. Kathy was living in my basement for the summer, although she was away on a two-week road trip for the first half of the month.


• I create a page called "100 Things About Me", as was common in the fading days of Web 1.0. This eventually grew to "222 Things About Me" until I took it down in 2009 after too many recruiters were finding it instead of my resume.


• I had reconnected with Kim from high school and was seeing really bad movies like Fantastic Four with her in the waning days of Springfield Mall.


• I experimented with a feature that would eventually become Newsday Tuesday by talking about day laborers in Herndon and their STDs.


• One of my old web hosts, Futurepoint, outsourced tech support to India, which marked the beginning of a long, frustrating decline. (I moved to Kattare in 2008).


• Blizzard renamed one of the collectible cat pets in World of Warcraft from Maine Coon to Black Tabby (because Black is less racist?). "This non-combat pet name was changed as there were a number of concerns expressed by players that had never heard of this particular breed of cat. To them it seemed offensive, which was never our intent upon introducing this pet. I'm sorry if you're the owner of such a pet and your desire to love it has lessened since patch version 1.6."


• Harry Potter Book 6 came out, and I read it in a day and a half.


• My dad and I built sidewalks around the house. Amber is in the basement in the photo because at this time, the cats were allowed free range and reign (pre Pee-gate).


• I wrote my first Friday Fragments column, which ultimately lasted until 2012.


• Paige resurfaced on my blog from Houston (pre-Spain) and spent several days consuming every single update since 2003.


• I spent $46.16 at Michael's for frames to hang some posters I'd just purchased from AllPosters.com -- 3 black and white images of jazz icons, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Dizzy Gillespie. They neglected to scan the 3rd frame, so I saved about 40 dollars.


• My digital music purchasing routine involved buying songs as Windows Media files from Walmart Music and then rerecording them as DRM-free MP3s with Adobe Audition.

What were you doing ten years ago in July?