![]() ![]() He assigned me to lead a task force to craft a proposal for taking the Bee online. “Every day we wait, we risk our franchise!” So I became a burr in the side of Orage Quarles III, publisher of the Bee. And while most people’s Internet experiences were still defined by Yahoo’s hierarchal link trees (or AOL’s Cops Who Flirt III chatrooms), it was clear that newspapers had a tremendous opportunity. Information was going to shed its geographic moorings. A cognitive-theory professor who looked like Gandalf showed me a web browser for the first time. My investigative reporting on homelessness, runaway teenagers, and methamphetamine was certainly more native.īut eighteen months later, after the Mosaic browser began leaking out of Illinois at five thousand downloads a month and dial-up speeds crossed fifty-six kilobits per second, I remember sitting in a cramped office at California State University, Stanislaus. While Modesto rode the housing boom of the late eighties, claiming to be a bedroom community of the Bay Area, the city was never far from its Dust Bowl-refugee roots. What I covered had little to do with local readers-at least, not in the present tense. ![]() My editors indulged me, no two ways about it. I covered technology for The Modesto Bee, syndicated by McClatchy News Service, and made multiple trips to the Bay Area to write about online innovation long before there was a dot-com bubble. It was a pattern I repeated dozens of times. The innovation of the conference was far away. It is a blanket that shrouds everything.Īnd as I descended into the fog, thoughts of a digital frontier disappeared. The ground fog can cut visibility to zero, kills more Californians than any other weather phenomenon, and tastes faintly of ozone. The Valley-a giant basin ringed by mountains-fills with tule fog in the winter. It was past midnight, mid-winter, and as my headlights bore down on the Central Valley, I saw the familiar and treacherous soup below. My head buzzed with encryption algorithms, social engineering schemes, and visions of an emerging digital frontier as I crested the Coastal Range. Plan ahead and alter your daily commute to arrive at you destination in a safe manner.In 1993, I was driving home to Modesto after covering a Bay Area conference on cryptography, having spent the past fourteen hours with hackers, phone phreaks, and other libertines who inhabited the pre-web text warren called the Internet. Please download the Caltrans Quick Maps app for the latest closures on our state highways. Your patience during this time is greatly appreciated. We understand the frustration road closures bring. The CHP Modesto could not thank enough the efforts from Caltrans, District 10, Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Office, West Stanislaus County Fire Protection District, Patterson Police Services and Stanislaus County Roads. Monday, “ONE LONG DAY…& TOMORROW: It is safe to say the west side of Stanislaus County was slammed today with unprecedented flooding. This all came several hours after the California Highway Patrol’s Modesto office posted on social media at about 7:15 p.m. ![]() Shortly before the tornado warning, at 3:25 a.m., the National Weather Service office in Sacramento posted on social media that “a line of strong thunderstorms with very heavy rain, small hail and strong wind will move through the Sacramento, Stockton and Modesto areas shortly. And then there was the emergency alert that sounded on smartphones at 3:44 a.m., warning of possible tornadoes in areas including Modesto, Ceres and Riverbank until 4:15 a.m. If the rain and wind didn’t wake Modesto area residents early Tuesday, bright cracks of lightning and the roar of thunder likely did. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |