Goodbye 2009. Goodbye Sherwood Web Design.

A few years ago, I fancied myself a freelance web designer. After all, I’ve been designing websites since 1996 or so, back in the days before the Mosaic browser could even support graphics.

Remember Mosaic? Pre-graphical internet? Lynx?

No?

Get off my lawn.

Then along came Flash and CMS and all kinds of other things that I simply didn’t keep up with.

I still do web design work. In fact, that’s one of my main duties at the job that pays the bills. But, I don’t freelance so much anymore. I do take care of websites for friends, but that’s about it.

Many years ago, I worked under the name Simplicity Web Design because I kept my designs simple. Simple to navigate. Simple to maintain. Someone else registered the name, so I decided to find another. The inspiration came during a visit to my hometown of Plainville, Connecticut.

Years before I was born (I’m not that old, but you still need to get off my lawn), THE phone company used lettered prefixes for phone numbers. For instance, if your prefix (that’s the first 3 digits after the area code, kids) starts with 7-4 like Plainville’s did, they’d choose letters that were on the telephone’s rotary dial (lawn – off!) for the prefix. In Plainville’s case, they choose S-H.

Maybe you’ve heard actors in old movies who would pick up a phone and connect directly to the operator. They’d ask for “Klondike-5″ followed by the last 4 digits of the number. It was “Klondike” because the prefix was actually “5-5-5″ and they chose “K-L” for the letter designation. “K-L” lead to “KLondike”. Get it?

Well, in Plainville’s case, “S-H” lead to “SHerwood”. As a result, we had places like Sherwood Cleaners (which still exists) and Sherwood Pharmacy (which closed decades ago).

And that’s how Simplicity Web Design became Sherwood Web Design.

Since I no longer do a lot of freelance work and I decided to let the company go, I stopped identifying myself as “Sherwood Web Design” in 2009.

Today, my domain registration for SherwoodWebDesign.com expired. I can no longer renew it. It will soon be released to the public for anyone to register. Even though I hold the trademark on the name both in Arizona and in the United States, if someone decides to pick up the name and use it for an actual web design business, I won’t fight it. Use it for porn or some other non web design related use, and I just might.

Anyway, Sherwood Web Design is history now, just like 2009. While I bid good riddance to the latter, I bid a fond farewell to the former.

Onward to other dreams.

Bot Alert

I got my first blog subscriber today! Oddly, this same “person” registered on over 700 other blogs that I can find at the same time.

BlondinkaVika subscribed with an email address of blondinkavikam@yandex.ru via some sort of bot routine. If you find this among your blog users, my advice is to delete it immediately and block it if you can.

Fortunately I’ve got my default new user setting on “Subscriber” so this one couldn’t do any damage to my blog, but if it gains access as an editor or author elsewhere, there’s going to be trouble.

Not a happy cat

About three years ago, our cat, Cagney, had to have some dental cleaning done. For this, the vet has to knock her out. Fair enough.

Unfortunately during that visit, the vet didn’t take any blood tests on Cagney first which should have been standard for a cat her age (10 at the time). After having trouble recovering from the anesthesia, we found out Cagney had uncontrolled diabetes. The vet, now our ex-vet, did what many vets do with diabetic cats and pumped her full of insulin. Too much insulin, it turns out. He sent Cagney into a coma from which she nearly died.

Three years later, and Cagney’s home from her latest dental cleaning done by a vet who understands feline diabetes. She’s a bit groggy and a little unsteady on her feet, but she’s in better shape than she was back then and we’re monitoring her blood sugar and overall catitude to make sure we don’t have to rush an “essentially dead kitty”, as her chart at the emergency vet said, to doctor again.