I’m being audited for the research study I did for my thesis. Each year they randomly choose a bunch of people who did them. I basically just have to collect up all my consent forms, research materials, etc etc. And be ready to present them to some guy so he can look over them and make sure I followed the rules for doing a research study correctly. It’s a pain in the butt, if only because it’s just another thing I have to do on top of everything else.

While I was looking for my consent forms, I found bunch of old emails I had printed out. Back in the day, I use to print out emails which were sent to me, just so I’d have a hard copy. I did this for programming message boards a lot too, so I could study the code later. I also found a print out of what my original site looked like back in the day. Reading over its news section brought back some memories. AOL had some message board security holes, and I had actually created my own official AOL message board (you could get to it through their keyword feature). It later got deleted, but it’s kind of funny to think I used to have an official AOL message board.

Anyway, in case you’re bored, I’ve posted a few of the more interesting emails below.

Email #1: I got this after posting up a review of the movie “Man on the Moon”. I have no idea if this guy is who he says he is. It was a weird email though.

“Yo..Let me figure somethings out..You hate mr.Hollywood (andy kaufman)? Or what? He was a god, started new things, no one can take that away from him neither! The thought about your review for Man On The Moon make me nuts. To hard to see if you hate him or not. He worked for my father he was a nice man. This is how you can see i am for real my father owned jerrys famous deli, ANDY KAUFMAN NEVER CASHED A CHECK! Never ever! We never ever knew when he was going to come into work. If you watch comedy central and see jerry my father in the 80’s he don’t look like that no more! plus he sold it. Back to my point andy is a god, jim is a fool, and you make me drule with all your god damn rules with mailing! Am i butt kissing? no way. By the way i like your api spy 4.0. You can post this i don’t care! This is not supposed to be mean this is just me gettin pist!” – Lance, 1/16/2000

Email #2: This was actually a series of emails. Some guy wanted the source to my API Spy. I said no, and he flipped out and threatened to hack my site. I unfortunately didn’t save my responses to him, but I printed out his emails so I’d have a record for later (in case I was ever in another exchange with him). This kind of thing actually wasn’t uncommon and is one of the things that soured me towards the whole “aol prog scene”. Everyone was so hungry for “ao-fame”. Ugh. Just re-reading this crap makes me wonder why I helped so many of those people (I wrote a code generating example, but I would not release the code to my app because I knew there’d be a ton of people who’d just re-released it with their name on it – the aol prog scene was just that bad).

“no prob i already figured out ur code, although the inferface will look very different the core coding is simple….i really think its sad when any one person is so self absorbed that they will not share in the interest of education. Its all good though you are the kind of person that surpresses to stay on top, instead of share to advance all.” – Troy (lilhitmahn), 12/8/1999

“no problem and now I will tell peepz that i wrote the code instead of giving u the credit” – Troy (lilhitmahn), 12/9/1999

“thats aite cuz iv told all mah partners to bomb ur lame ass page. dun b surprised when ur shiet displays a hacked by 05007 code and ur page is fucked” – Troy (lilhitmahn), 12/11/1999