A long time ago, in a galax... well, the South almost counts. Look, do you wanna hear the story or what? There was this guy named Da... How long ago? What am I, a calendar? Yeah, it was spring in 1993 or somethin'. Anyway, let me talk already.
So, there and then a guy named Dan got sick of his job and quit. It wasn't easy, it took him many months to wean himself from the job, but eventually he got down to only going to work two days a week, and finally he and his soon to be ex boss decided that yep, Dan had trained his replacements, and Dan walked out the door and felt very free.
For a couple of days, weeks even, Dan felt really free. He spent some time guiding whitewater professionally, some time rock climbing. But then bill time came, and he realized that sooner or later he had to be makin' some money. So he started consulting, a little here, a little there, and pretty soon he'd fallen in with a rough crowd, notably Mike and Debbie, who ran a company called HTS which fixed medical equipment. Debbie did the books and tried to keep Mike focused. Mike was a great salesman and a pretty good technical person, but had trouble staying focused. Dan was an awesome technical person and so ended up getting hired by HTS occasionally.
Anyway, after a couple of projects, Mike and Dan got involved in a group that was trying to build a community network in Chattanooga, but was stuck in committeedom. Both were frustrated and talked about just doing this commercially rather than as a non-profit. One day Dan walked in to the HTS office and Mike said "Let's start an Internet provider. I've ordered a T-1 line, we've got three months to pay for installation fees and catch up on the costs, and in the 3 weeks it'll take to get installed you can learn enough about Unix and TCP/IP to get it set up, right?"
Thanks to a couple of friends, notably Robert Wilson and Aaron Spink, Mike and Dan did learn something about Unix and TCP/IP, and one fateful day we hooked everything together and typed "traceroute internic.net". And it worked.
So Chattanooga On-line, AKA flutterby.com, was born. And grew, and was successful. And Dan went back to his first love, which was programming and graphics, and, because it was often his responsibility to keep the network running and therefore he had to use it as the users would, spent a lot of time reading and writing on the comp.graphics.algorithms newsgroup. And life was good, and there were ups and downs, and Dan started to look around for his next challenge.
Then one morning, at 5:30 when he checked in to make sure the systems were running (Mike did the evening check at midnight or so), he got an e-mail from a name he recognized from the old SIGGRAPH computer graphics papers, a guy named Ed Catmull who, after bouncing around a bit, had gotten Steve Jobs to fund a company called Pixar. The e-mail asked if Dan was interested in interviewing with Pixar. Dan had seen Pixar's short films and some of their publications, and thought it was way cool, and said 'why not?' or maybe it was 'when can I start?'. And so Dan left Chattanooga and moved to California. Shortly thereafter Pixar finished making 'Toy Story' for Disney, and is now a household name.
But Dan still owns a piece of Chattanooga On-Line, and can't think of any cooler more reliable place to keep his e-mail, because after all he set up the place to begin with. So while he connects through various different networks, that's his permanent address.
And that, kiddos, is why Dan lives in California but uses a Chattanooga address.
One of the things I've realized after leaving Chattanooga is that it's very much stuck where it is. I want to be on the cutting edge, but as long as Chattanooga is as conservative as it is socially, it's not going to be able to be a technological or cultural leader. I'm working on a longer essay on this .