Aquarionics

Happy Birthdayish

I’ve been doing Aquarionics for four years.

This is the fifth year of me doing Aquarionics.

I registered Aquarionics.com on the 27th of December 1999 in the final act of a dying century, and uploaded Aquarionics.com version 1 to an IP address. DNS resolution started to happen on the 1^st January 2000, when the first visitor who wasn’t me went to the site. This is where I count the founding of Aquarionics dot com from. That is where I drew the line in the sand.

This means that Aquarionics is the single longest project in my life. Ever. This is the thing, the only thing sometimes, that keeps me doing it. Because of the ammount of times I refer to this in my life. I don’t ever remember the exact date when me and LoneCat got together (It was the 27th August, I know this because I’m prefilling in my diary for next year) because I didn’t blog it. I was on hiatus. And I really regret that now.

The last few months have had a dearth of actual content, due to getting a job. With a bit of luck the three hours commuting that I’m doing at the moment will be cut by a third when I move in late January/Early feb. Moving house is one of those fun experiences famous for being one of the top five most stressful things you can do, and I’ve done it every year for the last five, in some form or other. From home to Sunderland, Halls to Flat, Flat back home again, Home to Cambridge, Cambridge to Reading, and now Reading to the wonders of Letchworth, I’m getting a little bored of moving house. The fact that – for all it’s design paradiems and madness – this site has been the most stable thing in my life is a little scary.

I hadn’t realised how much the commute was wiping me out until I sat down just before Christmas and actually sat down and coded for a while and got the architecture and design of the next phase of the site down in a couple of days, for the times, they are a-changin.

I’ve been dotting around this for a while, and there is no reason to really suspect that this won’t change before I get around to putting it all into place, but the site has a problem, and the problem is this:

Aquarionics is my personal site.

This means that anything I try to put on it for other people to do gets instantly lost in the all-pervasive “Aquarion’s Stuff”. One of the best parts of the site, as far as I’m concerned, is Forever an infinatly branching story system that began on May 23rd 2002 and currently has 672 parts in it. The last part was written in September. 2547 people have been though this site (uniques, measured by ip & user agent) in the last five days (When I started the statistics logging again), and not one has even visited that area of the site. This needs to be repaired, and repaired it will be.

So, the plan for the next twelve months is to get back into the swing of things, to write, to code, to live and to journal all this as it happens.

There will be new projects (And not just my own ones, Pol – who hosts AqCom – has launched his new reviews site Geekstuff, which I’m designing icons for and will be writing for just as soon as I find something worth reviewing…), old projects, borrowed projects and – because this is still me doing all this – blue projects.

And I will complete project Alice. Really. No excuses.

Coming up: Review of the year, Review of New Years Eve, Review of Return of the King.

Go Aquarionics.

Go Me.