AltaVista Company

Chances are you've heard of AltaVista in reference to the revolutionary Internet search site. If not, you can certainly find out about AltaVista, either by visiting the www.altavista.com site, checking out wikipedia, or even read the book AltaVista Search Revolution.

Chances are, unless you are familiar with enterprise search technology, you haven't heard of the AltaVista software, a small business unit based out of Andover Ma. which productized the Internet search technology and created the AltaVista Search Engine and later AV Enterprise Search product lines. These multi-platform products included a single node search engine application supporting crawling of Web, database, file systems, and email.

The real value, however, was the included SDK, which allowed 3rd party developers to integrate the AltaVista Search technology directly into their applications and services. This provided for a very tight, high performance, full text search ability. The SDK was used by many OEM and search centric customers.

Alas, AltaVista's then parent company CMGi lacked the vision and ability on how to capitalize on the enterprise search market. Eventually the enterprise search group was sold off - first to Overture and later to FAST Search & Transfer, and the product lines retired.  The AltaVista Enterprise Search products are no longer commercially available, though the technology may live on for quite a while in deployed applications.

Rick and Suzette's First Date

How cool was it that Suzee wanted to see X-Men and it became our first date? Very cool.

The many faces of Rick

Back when I was trying to convince Suzee to date me - we'd met online and hadn't yet met in person - I set up a web page  to show her the many faces of Rick. The idea was to show "the other" faces, the one's you don't see in online dating. It must have worked - she agreed to meet, and subsequently date and marry me.

Happy Rick

Bored Rick

Thoughtful Rick

Angry Rick

Scared Rick

Silly Rick

Viva la hair!

Okay, those that know me know that I tend to wait a little to long between hair cuts. Sometimes WAY to long.  This self photo was taken after I'd left the navy and went back to school. I hadn't cut my hair for about three years. I don't know that I ever thought it looked good, but I did like that I had the option to not cut my hair. Some freedoms you just have to do without in order to really appreciate.

Viva la hair!

My last Navy photo

We'd all like that heroic military photo to put over the mantle. You know, the one where people go "oh ah" he was such dashing figure! Sadly, this is not that photo. Indeed, this is probably one of the worst military photo in history; it is certainly the "shaggiest" I ever looked in uniform. 

The back story is this picture was on the USS Horne, taken for the cruise book two days out of San Diego on our trip to the Persian Gulf. Prior to deployment, between getting the ship ready, fixing innumerable faults, parting, and oh yes, eloping, I hadn't slept in weeks. Apparently I hadn't gotten a hair cut either! I had no notice about the photo shoot, had to run down and jump into dress uniform (or at least the top, missing the whole top row of ribbons, grungy t-shirt and bottom was my work jeans!) to get one shot at the photo. 

Amazing, as we age, how even the worst photos of our younger selves start to look pretty good.