Disclaimer: this is the story as I remember it. very likely to be incomplete and/or incorrect, but a story nonetheless. Leave comments for corrections. oh, and tell me when i should stop.

So, the summer of ’99 was fast approaching and things were looking up for the CCS IT Deptartment. In a mere week, we had doubled our size from one to two. Between the John and I, we could pretty much handle all the programming and infrastructure needs to keep the ship on an even keel, but John was never the kind to keep the status quo. We needed more (get used to this phrase).

I don’t know if it was John’s disdain for AcIS or their incompetence, but it was clear that we were moving in a different direction than what any of the other technology group on campus wanted to go. In order to continue, we’d need our own servers. Enter Eeyore.

Eeyore was the bees knees back in the day. A dual proc PIII 500 MHz Dell box with half a gig of ram . . . ! Getting him was actually a difficult task as John had ordered him with Linux installed by the factory. It ended up taking a few more weeks for the dell kids to figure out how to get it right, but by early spring we had our first server running RedHat 5.2, kicking up a storm in the corner of the office.

More important than hardware, we needed a new Tawana, because the lord knew that one thing John wasn’t was a designer. Enter Helen Chu.

I wasn’t there when she interviewed, but i remember walking into the office one day and John telling me, “We have a new Tawana.” To be honest, the magnitude of the moment was lost on me. Even my first encounter with Helen was a bit subdued. I attribute this to that awkward acclimation period of starting a new job. Or maybe I just didn’t know how to recognize wonderful people until I met Helen. Anyway, one thing I was in the office for was Helen’s first account on eeyore. weeee.

So, now there was John, Helen, me and eeyore, but we still needed more. Specifically, we needed more of that secret special sauce known as intern labor. This was easily remedied by a call out for resumes (we were working for the center for career services, after all), and a few interviews later, we had our first intern corps: Rob Esris, Leslie Hsiung, and myself. For that summer, Rob was to write a web poll program in c++ whose project name I’ve forgotten, Leslie was our web intern. You all remember those animated, cartoon lions that used to crawl all over our sites? Yeah. leslie. hand drawn. And myself? I was purposed for more MadSearch love.

And so we had a captain, a web mistress, three interns, and a server. Lots of damage could have been wrought with that combination, except we were missing actual computers to work on. Not a problem. One phone call to our favorite hardware provider and a couple weeks later, we said hello to pooh, kanga, roo, piglet and tigger. The Orginals. These bad boys weren’t pizza boxes sitting in a rack. They were dual boot windows 98/linux boxen installed by John himself(!) with 19″ crt montiors (19 inches! the good stuff!). yeah . . . those were the good days when JLG had not yet been swallowed up by redmond dogma. If i remember correctly, John took pooh, helen got kanga, i worked off of tigger . . . i want to say leslie had piglet and rob sat on roo. Anyway, significant as this was my first encounter with the penguin, learning to ssh and not telnet, playing with system administration, and finding my window manager of choice, WindowMaker. yum.

As I’m writing this, I’m suddenly realizing how crucial a period of time this was for us. And, although i keep using the pronouns of “us” and “we,” it really was john driving all of this change.  Well, as unleashed John since, in addition to Tawana leaving, the CCS Director had also left.  Yeah, as the selfishcrab has observed, turnover is quite high in the Lions’ halls. But there’s this chinese saying that the new can’t come until the old has left and the Director’s vacancy opened the window for another significant event, a need to appoint an interim Director. That lucky interim Director was Sue Mescher.

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