It's already tomorrow in Australia
Submitted by
on Tue, 09/23/2008 at 7:16pm.
Have you noticed that sometimes people who have spent a great deal of time on chess.com suddenly disappear for a while? I've just had a break myself and it extended much longer than intended—probably about six weeks.
Of course I wasn't completely absent—I just cut back on the number of games I was playing and eliminated virtually any other input. I wanted some time to myself to revamp a couple of web pages.
I became involved in writing web pages by accident. Robert Ambalong, the Rooty Hill Chess Club webmaster, was travelling to Canada for a few months and offered to teach me HTML if I'd look after the web page while he was away. This we did by Email and he was able to guide me through my early blunders. When he returned to Oz he said, “It's yours now. You've got the job." And so I maintained the site for the next three years, which included writing all the reports and stories. Some of them have been repeated on chess.com, either in this blog or in other places. Even Batgirl found a story there about a travelling chess club and linked to it. The Rooty Hill site is at http://www.rootyhillchess.org but I haven't touched it for over twelve months since I no longer play at the club. (Not too coincidentally, that's about the same time I've been playing on chess.com.) The page has reverted to Robert whose hands are far more capable than mine.
However, when Robert started to teach me HTML I decided to put up a site of my own on my ISP's free space, just to practise. Obviously it was always going to have some errors and one of the things I've been doing over the past weeks is completely re-writing the site to make it more user-friendly and, for that matter, more interesting. I called it Tomorrowland because Charles Schulz (of Snoopy fame) once pointed out that the world can't end today because “it's already tomorrow in Australia”. So, to my twisted mind, Australia and Tomorrowland became interchangeable.
Tomorrowland is very much a personal web page and the subjects covered reflect my interests. These include Chess, Tall Tales (from my newspaper column), Short Stories, Dancing With Dozy (square dancing), Hang Gliding, Triathlon, Channel Swimming, Morse Code (the earliest Email), Mysticism, some family anecdotes, and a smidgeon of poetry—some comic, some not. Tomorrowland is at http://www.tomorrowland.info.
That's two web pages, so far. Along the way I was asked to set up another page for the Fairfield Chess Club, one of the most vibrant clubs in western Sydney which, unfortunately, came to an untimely end—and the web page with it.
The other page I write these days, which I also upgraded during the break, belongs to a Seniors' educational group called U3A (or the University of the Third Age). U3A covers a lot of academic ground and offers local courses ranging from astronomy and mathematics to mah jong and chess. U3A's local web site is at http://www.u3anepean.org but may not be of much interest to people who aren't already in the loop.
There is a great deal of software available if you want to write web pages. I started with a simple text editor (Textpad) and used that for about a year before finding CSE's HTML Validator which is something like a text editor with ambition. (It not only validates the HTML codes but has lots of keyboard short cuts that speed things up enormously.) I tried a couple of HTML editors (FrontPage and PageBreeze) but found that even though they were slightly faster than my CSE Validator, the results didn't always look very good.
So that's my apology for being AWOL from chess.com. You're all invited to visit Tomorrowland. There's something there for everybody. Come in, take your shoes off, have a coffee, make yourself at home.
And do feel free to comment. I'm always looking for ways to improve so I'd appreciate any feedback, whether complimentary or critical. I've got thick skin.