Back when I was attending Heald College, I had a final project that I submitted for graduation. It was supposed to have been part of a three-man, comprehensive web hosting project; we were going to set up a website using our own DNS and web servers.

The whole thing fell apart because, basically, there was more than one person involved. Privately, two of us blamed the third for sloth and inaction, and he probably blamed us in turn. Hard to say. Anyway, big egos got bruised.

At any rate, I fabricated a farcical web hosting company ("Integrated Internet Ideas", or "III"), which, in retrospect, had I put the site up in 1996 instead of 1998, when the blossom of the ‘Net had begun to fade, I probably would have had venture capitalists throwing fistfuls of Krugerrands through my window. I had almost forgotten about the thing, except that I suddenly remembered that I was still paying an old dial-up ISP ten bucks a month for services I hadn’t used for almost a year. I could really use all that South African gold now, considering how well I pay attention to my finances.

My train of thought then hurtled off into its normal labyrinth of branch lines and forgotten spurs, when I also realized that this old project was still hosted there, and when I killed that ISP account, so would that small labor of love vanish, piped off to dev/null, thrown carelessly into the bit bucket, consigned to oblivion in a dark, small, anonymous place, as a magnetic head far away in Houston, Texas ruthlessly realigned millions of iron oxide particles on a hard disk. O woe, to be fated thus! I could not bear to be a party to such extermination. I could no more forsake one of my first digital creations than a parent could a suckling babe, or a glutton throw away a bag of chips, were there still a significant amount of crumbs and flavor powder in the deepest corners of the bag.

Therefore I sucked it down off the ISP’s servers: you can check out this towering masterwork of late 20th-century gibberish right here.