I know it’s not personal and no one at any of these places even knows today is my birthday, but I still appreciate the annual deluge of auto-generated birthday wish emails. I think about all of the programmers building this feature into all of these web forums, CRM systems and email marketing platforms, telling themselves “this will be a cool thing, customers will appreciate this.” I know so many engineers that love to make the world better with their work… thanks, all of you!

I’m consolidating and organizing some data backups today, adding files to Amazon Glacier storage using the fantastic Arq client, and just like when I dig through the boxes in the back of my closet, I’m finding all sorts of gems.

Here’s a great one – I was researching the specs and mechanics of banner advertising in June 1999, and collected a few samples of different approaches. Boy, how far we have come:

Remember this classic approach? Make your ad look like a popup window. And then when someone clicks the close box to get rid of it… boom! CTR lift.

Microsoft was still talking about “the intranet”, because connecting all the computers in your office was still a revolutionary idea.

Here are the rest of my vintage collection, posted for posterity and/or my own amusement:

After a year of managing to not bump the camera, I have more than 30,000 images out the window of my Belltown apartment of the Space Needle, Queen Anne hill and the arches of Seattle’s Pacific Science Center. I’ll be working on a way to present them, but for now the Project Page is here.

My webcam was set to capture the night sky every 10 seconds last night; below are a few of the best shots and a timelapse of them all:

You can find the rest of the still photos here.

In addition to getting our picture taken with virtual-Flo from the Progressive ads, the custom bikes were really the highlight this year and the focus of my shots. So much attention to detail, so many clever ideas, so much work!

Gallery is here – slideshow button is at the top-right corner.