Welcome to my playground. Back when I was in college, the internet was finding its own (early 2000's) and webpages were the hot new thing. That was the dotcom bubble, which burst shortly afterwards. That was the time before "blogs", they called them EN sites (I never did figure out what EN stood for) and you were awesome if you had your own website. I hosted janusmachine.com from my personal PC in my dorm room. I even had a webcam. Fast forward to today, web technology has matured to the point that everyone can post a site about themselves. Blogs are not personal websites they're news feeds that rival traditional media. I'll admit I've missed out on a lot of web developments in that time. Specifically, CSS was probably around when I made my first webpage but I didn't partake. I used frames and I copied JavaScript from other pages doing what I wanted to do. So anyway, here I am revisiting the glory days of yore and ressurecting janusmachine.com. Bear with me while I screw around with CSS and PHP and mySQL and who knows what else.
The background image is from the Library of Congress Flickr collection, which has been posted royalty and copyright free. Taken by Jack Delano, it is in the roundhouse at a Chicago and Northwestern Railroad yard, Chicago, Ill. (1942 Dec.).
As a reminder to all, this is the text where I originally heard the term "Janus machine", from Escape Velocity by Mark Dery:
Taking it as a given that technology is inextricably woven into the warp and woof of our lives, nearly all of the computer-age subcultures profiled in Escape Velocity short-circuit the technophile-versus-technophobe debate that inevitably follows that assumption. Most of them regard the computer - a metonymy, at this point, for all technology - as a Janus machine, an engine of liberation and an instrument of repression. And all are engaged in the inherently political activity of expropriating technology from the scientists and CEOs, policymakers and opinion-shapers who have traditionally determined the applications, availability, and evolution of the devices that, more and more, shape our lives.