Surfin' With Stan Back In The Day

In the 1990's I wrote newspaper column called "Surfin With Stan".  I used an application called "Arrow"  to create an online mailing list. The column took questions sent to the list and answered them in the paper. Although not widely circulated within the extremely intelligent Newspaper Publishing Industry, it did have a good following in the not so bright commoners.  I had a couple of thousand subscribers in 1996. I shut it down when I began getting over a 100 requests for help per day.  The last week of the column I received over 1000 emails requesting help.

I Know What You Are, But What Am I? 

I didn't mind the request. But there's an expression that describes what happened.  I became a target for hate email. "Why don't you answer my question?", "Can't you just stop by my house and fix it?", and "My computer doesn't have anything that says properties. All it has is a keyboard and a mouse! " were some I can remember off the top of my head. I wasn't being paid for the column. So I spoke to the newspaper about quitting the column. . They said all this Internet stuff was just a fad anyway. The editor and staff writer I worked with are now working at WalMart, and the advertising rep is in his 7th or 8th Multi Level Marketing company.

A Place To Store The Columns

Originally Surfin With Stan was a site that allowed me to store archives for my newspaper column. I was still getting requests, but they were all free.  I needed a way to separate it from my business.  It went through several iterations.  You can see some of them at The Wayback Archives. At some point I decided not to store the columns and began to let the site die a slow death.  That never happened.  Some of the articles, such as "How To Write Your Google Profile" are still popular.

So What Is It Now? 

I've decided to use it to put up stories, and links to things I find interesting on the Internet. Most of those will probably be reviews of sites, or explanations on how to resolve a technical problem.  Mostly stuff that I don't want on the StanBush.Net site, which is really not about technology as much as it is about people. Maybe that way it will finally become more useful. You might want to put it in your RSS feed, as I expect I'll be adding to it on a much more regular basis now! 

Thanks for reading!