60http://blog.roguehawg.comen Ugly GeneUgly Genegene@roguehawg.comnohttp://blog.roguehawg.com/2008/03/30/welcome-to-the-real-hawg-blawg.aspx?ref=rssUgly GeneWelcome to the real Hawg Blawg.  I  am amazed at the impact of the internet has had on our society and the way we communicate with each other.  In 1997 I started my humble web site , roguehawg.com slightly before I was aware of ebay or possibly before ebay existed.  I started out with text only ads and if someone wanted pictures of what I had to sell I would take some shots with my 35 mm camera, [remember film ?] and send the pictures via Snail Mail.  But it was not long, with encouragement from my wife Lori, that I made a big step to speed up the information exchange by taking the pictures with my camera then taking the prints and scanning them, saving the file and uploading the shots to my web site and after becoming more adept with email, again thanks to my very smart and patient wife, I was soon emailing with the best of them or at lest trying to.  I was still learning about pixels, gifs, jpegs and file sizes but I kept at it all along dealing with a dial up line and aol.  What a combination that was, first when we signed up for aol the standard monthly fee allowed 120 minutes of internet use then they would charge for the minutes you went over which was a lot because back then on a dial up connection you would spend what seemed like hours to down load a page that had any kind of pictures on it.  I am serious, I would go to a page and it would be grinding away trying to upload a picture which would load in strips one strip at a time until finally, if you had not lost your phone connection by now, you would see a picture on the web page.  It was then that I figured out I wanted my page to load as fast as possible so I stayed with mostly all text in my ads and if someone wanted to see some pictures I would then email them some.  What few pictures I had on my page were gifs which were very grainy and lacked a lot of detail compared to jpegs and bitmaps.  Around 1999 I discovered ebay and my hobby/second job changed from swap meet season being a couple months in the early spring then a couple months in early fall to year round.  I got to go to a swap meet everyday sometimes in my underwear.  Ebay changed the swap meets though the change took a while because most of the older, hard core vintage motorcycle enthusiasts were not computer geeks at first.  In fact I was, if it is proper to honk my own horn, on the cutting edge of blending the technology of the internet and computers and old greasy motorcycle parts that antique motorcycle owners needed, wanted and were desperately searching for.  With my discovery of ebay I also discovered to be a player on ebay I desperately needed a digital camera so I went a made a fairly major investment on a new Cannon digital camera which was touted to be the best and would take the most highly detailed pictures known to man at a 1.2 mega pixel maximum.  It sure sounded like a lot to me back then and the pictures were great compared to what I had been doing with my old film camera.  The dial up connection was still a challenge and the challenge was how big to make my pictures so they would load fast enough on ebay, not lock up my computer or loose my dial up connection half way through the upload.  But I persevered and jumped into the ebay pool which sometimes filled with sharks and gators but for the most part just people like me looking through one man's junk for our treasures.I have been able to finish my restoration projects thanks in no small part to ebay and I have passed on parts I did not need to others who did and pay for more parts I needed.  The one thing that ebay will never provide is the human interaction that happens at a swap meet.  The tall tales that are told, the bartering, selling , buying, learning and teaching about the intricacies of our passion, the antique motorcycle.  Motorcycles have been as close to a religion for me as anything I have experienced on this earth in my 52 plus years.  I have had a pair of handlebars and a motor under me for 40 of those years and I hope I got at least 40 more.  Ugly Genehttp://blog.roguehawg.com/2008/03/30/welcome-to-the-real-hawg-blawg.aspx#Commentsfc28bcef-08b8-45da-9c99-a8977f1af981Sun, 30 Mar 2008 17:41:59 GMT