While future historians will undoubtedly remember August 7th primarily as SteelyKid's birthday (it would be irresponsible of me to encourage people to go edit the Wikipedia date page accordingly, wouldn't it?), there was another locally important event on August 7th, some years earlier: August 7th, 2001, saw my first blog post ever, the inaugural post of my old book log The Library of Babel, so long ago it was hand-crafted HTML with no item permalinks-- scroll all the way to the bottom to see the first entry.
It's a little hard to believe that I've been doing this blogging thing for a decade, now. Granted, that was a somewhat specialized form of blogging, and was subsequently moved to Blogger, and then incorporated into this site, so the more significant blog anniversary will be next June, when this blog turns 10. Either way, though: damn, I'm old.
I'll probably do some sort of retrospective thing next year, maybe a best-of collection of posts. It's alternately interesting and cringe-inducing to look back through the blog archives, so we'll see how much of it I can take... But I didn't want to let this anniversary pass without saying something.
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Congratulations, Chad. I've read you for a long time. Not at the Babel site, but at the Blogger site since probably 2002 or 2003 if that is possible.
Congratulations on the anniversary...
And, having time to read when you started The Library of Babel. I assume back then you were either finishing your dissertation, being a post-doc, or starting as an asst. professor.
I noticed a book by Williams Sleator, whom I wasn't familiar with until I read this in today's NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/books/william-sleator-science-fiction…
I apologize for the sad news.