Depths of Wikipedia memory

Annie Rauwerda, creator of the always-entertaining depthsofwikipedia, reached out to see if I’d share any stories I remember from the early days of Wikipedia at Bomis.

I worked there twice, first as an intern in the summer of 2000 and again as a new college grad in 2001. Nupedia, Wikipedia’s predecessor, launched a handful of months before my internship. Wikipedia itself launched in the middle of my senior year at Rose—it had been up and running for a few months when I returned to San Diego to work at Bomis full time.

Most of the employees, including me, got laid off during the dot-com crash in late 2001.

While thinking about what stories to share with Annie, I decided to write them up & put them here, on my own site. So here are some of those stories, in vaguely chronological order.

Bike commute

I flew to San Diego in May 2000. It was my first time in California.

I stayed in Carolyn’s spare room that summer. She lived in an apartment on Torrey Pines Rd. in La Jolla. At the time, the Bomis office was on Lamont St. in Pacific Beach, between Garnet and Grand, about 7 miles south of her place.

Getting back and forth was a straight shot on the 30 bus. That’s how I commuted my first week, but that wasn’t the plan. The plan was for me to bike to work, snaking my way through downtown La Jolla, past Windansea and Bird Rock before getting to PB.

There was just one catch. I didn’t know how to ride one.

Sure, I was twenty years old and most people learned before they were ten. But despite the best efforts of my dad, I never managed to get the hang of it. But this time was going to be different. I committed myself to learn how to ride well enough to do the commute.

Carolyn took me to a bike shop, helped me pick out a mountain bike, and graciously taught me how to ride it. We worked at it every day after work that first week. I honestly wish I had video of the lessons, not for the many embarassing spills I took, but to learn her pedagogy. She was an excellent teacher, and Monday of my second week I rode to work for the first time.

One day that week, after only a few days of the commute, I remember Carolyn being upset. She had seen me flying down the hill on Torrey Pines at like a million miles an hour and (rightly) thought I wasn’t ready for that sort of thing. She made me promise to moderate my descent going forward, and I complied, for a week or two anyway.

I kept up the bike commute all summer, even after the company moved to an office building on Hancock St., near the San Diego Sports Arena, in late July or early August. This just about doubled the length of my commute, to something like a 25 mile round trip. I crossed three bridges (two over Mission Bay and one over the San Diego River) each way.

I had never lived somewhere with such consistently lovely weather, somewhere such a commute was a reasonable thing to do year round, and I loved it. I remember how fun and joyful those rides were. I think that’s when I first fell in love with San Diego, to be honest.

A Trip to Fry’s

I remember a trip to Fry’s, where every startup stocked up on hardware in those days. We were wandering around when we passed a display of those candy-colored, translucent iMacs.

Jimmy said I wish I had an excuse to buy one of those. I pointed out that we never tested the site in Mac browsers, simply because we didn’t have any Macs in the office.

That was all the pretense he needed. (Just tattoo Poor Impulse Control on our foreheads and get it over with already.) We walked out of there that day with the iMac he later went on to auction off for almost $200,000. Although I could have sworn it was a Bondi Blue one. Maybe there were two? Or maybe I’m mixing it up with my sister’s. Anyway.

Vegas, baby!

At some point during the summer of 2000 Jason had a brilliant yet terrible idea: what if we loaded different ads when a user clicked their browser’s back button? (Back then, most internet advertising was impression-based, so there was a real chance this could significantly impact our revenue.)

Jimmy told us to go ahead and try it, and if revenue increased by some unlikely threshold he would take the programming team to Vegas. Well, we tried it, and yeah, we exceeded whatever bar he’d set. So he took us all to Vegas. He rented a big van and we all piled in after work one Friday in August.

Jimmy drove. While on the way, he excitedly told us all about the World’s Largest Thermometer in Baker. We found his enthusiasm about this dubious roadside attraction funny, and relentlessly made fun of him about it over a chunk of the drive. He eventually threatened us that, if we didn’t cut it out, it would become the largest rectal thermometer in the world. We shut up.

We did a bunch of the things you usually do in Vegas, though the timing was a bit disappointing for me, being only a week or so before my 21^st birthday. We wandered through some casinos. We took in a show (the Blue Man Group at the Luxor). We had brunch at the Bellagio and a fancy dinner at Mark Miller's in the MGM Grand. It was a lot of fun.

“…where a kid can be a kid!”

I turned 21 that summer—my birthday’s in late August. There was a Chuck E. Cheese not far from the office. Jimmy declared my birthday, a Friday, to be Kids Day and took us all there for the occasion. Terry and I had to kneel to play air hockey at the kids-height table. It was ridiculous. I felt truly cared for, and knew I was gonna miss everyone terribly when I went back to school a week or two later.

After a chill birthday dinner at Carolyn’s that night, Andrew and Farsam took me to the full moon drum circle at Black’s Beach. That’s when I met Jing Jing and Rion, both of whom went on to become dear friends of mine. "Oh, Jing Jing/Rion? I met him/her at a nude beach the night of my 21^st birthday" has always been one of my best friendship origin stories.

The ultimate field trip

My mom was an elementary school teacher for over forty years. As children, my sister and I called our family vacations field trips, since the itineraries she planned were chock-full of museums, historic sites, and the like, and maybe a bit short on rest & relaxation. We learned a ton and I have a lot of great memories from those trips over the years.

Well, the cross-country road trip my folks and I went on after graduation, when they helped me move from Boston to San Diego, was the ultimate field trip. We left Boston in mid-June and barely got to San Diego in time for the Fourth of July.

Here are just some of the places we visited on the trip, in roughly east-to-west order:

• Terre Haute, to visit Casey and Dan and to pick up a couple of things I had left behind,
• the Lincoln Home in Springfield, Illinois,
• the Mark Twain Boyhood Home in Hannibal, Missouri, where we also went on a paddle-wheel steamboat ride on the Mississippi,
• Kansas City, just to have some ribs,
• the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas,
• the Air Force Academy, Pikes Peak, and the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs (& visited Colin),
• the Unsinkable Molly Brown House in Denver,
• Georgetown, an old mining town in Colorado,
• a canyon trifecta: Bryce, Zion, and the Grand Canyon, all in one day,
• the Hoover Dam,
• and Las Vegas.

They drove home after I got settled in to my apartment in San Diego, but they didn’t drive straight back. They drove north the whole way to Vancouver, via just about everything on the West Coast. They then proceeded east, dipping back and forth along the border a few times, stopping in too many places to recount. They got home by August, and are somehow still married. (I’m not sure I can imagine spending that much time on the road with someone else and surviving the trip with our relationship intact.)

Larry’s wedding

We returned to Vegas in December 2001 for Larry and Rita’s wedding. The officiant wasn’t an Elvis impersonator, alas. We went out for a burlesque show for his bachelor party the night before. (In hindsight, it was a pretty tame bachelor party by Vegas standards, but for me—a sweet summer child back then—it was a lot.)

A Merry Christmas

We got laid off in mid-December, the day before I flew home for Christmas. My cell phone was company-issued and I had to hand it in before leaving the office that day, so I didn’t call my folks with the news. I told them at T.F. Green when they picked me up.

The yellow Ferrari

Jason was the only programmer to survive the layoffs. (To be fair, you could totally run the entire operation with just him. He knew everything inside and out. He was—and is—amazing.)

A couple of months later, in early 2002, he invited me out for lunch and offered to come pick me up.

What I didn’t know is that he was gonna pick me up in Jimmy’s bright yellow Ferrari 308 GTB.

We hit the In-n-Out drive through but, when it came time to pay, Jason and I found that we didn’t quite have enough money. We were short less than a dollar, IIRC. The manager came out, took one look at the two of us in that ridiculous car, and had a good laugh as he let us get away with it.

It was a hell of a good time while it lasted. It was a small company, spread thin, and everyone had to do a bit of everything. I learned a bunch, made friends, wrote a ton of incredibly buggy Perl, and got to be part of something that went on to be one of the most significant human artifacts on the web.