Flooding in Wash D.C., tree gets knocked down at the White House and people are still dying in Iraq (and around the world.)

That certainly puts life into perspective this fine Tues. morning.

And here I thought we had problems.

Yesterday tepid introduction and attempt at bringing users into our system was met with - shall I say politely - several hostile rebuttals at my attempt at inviting folks in.

Did I ever tell yah the story of the world’s first virus?  Go Google - “Marc Canter” + “virus”. This article got it wrong - it wasn’t Freehand (which appeared like 6 years later) it was Pagemaker - Aldus’ flagship product and the virus got onto the master disk of the original main shipping product.

None of us had even ever heard of a virus before that point and this schmuck up in Montreal had put one onto a disk and then handed it to me.  The FBI, WSJ and several interviews with folks like John Markoff later - and I was famous.

Just spell the name right - folks.

Anyway so yesterday was one of those days.  You’re trying to drive straight down the street and achieve a simple task “get some people in to test with” and all of a sudden Mr. Zawodny and DeFillippo decide it’s pile on Marc day and take a right hand turn. Well at least me and Tim O’Reilly have something in common now.

Meanwhile - boy did that test work.

The code got bombarded with LOTS of pent up demand - which some of you may remember - goes back 3 years to when we first opened up the PeopleAggregator.  I was able to find references to it by Clay Shirky in the fall of ‘03.

That’s how long I’ve been tryign to get this thing built.

As I said before - this code has been un-touched by VCs money’s hands.  That’s why its so pure and its altruistic motives, design and models are designed to further fuck with the system.

So the poor baby is down for repairs right now.

Stay tuned.

Meanwhile - that fallen tree is the one on the $20 bill.  How cool is that?  That old elm tree was 140 years old.

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