Working Drafts

Until high school, my family lived in a small rural town in central Illinois. About two and a half hours south of Chicago and forty-five minutes west of Champaign-Urbana—the home of the University of Illinois. In 1993, Chambana was also the birthplace of one of the first web browsers: NCSA Mosaic. Mosaic would go on to become Netscape and then, eventually, Firefox. This was all long before Marc Andreessen became a Bond villain.

I was in middle school during that first electric stretch of the internet. We always had Macs in the house. Movies like Hackers and The Net ran constantly on cable. I was ready—emotionally, spiritually, hormonally—to put on rollerblades and start hacking the planet.

But I couldn’t. Not yet.

Internet access in Mt. Pulaski didn’t really exist unless you were willing to pay long-distance charges and dial into AOL, Prodigy, or CompuServe. Occasionally my parents allowed it, but those sessions were short and unsatisfying. It didn’t feel like the real internet. It felt like peeking through a locked door.

What we did have were magazines. Lots of them. MacUser and Macworld, especially. Those covers are burned into my brain. Without access to the actual web, those magazines became my portal to it.

Sometime between 1994 and 1996, I was flipping through MacUser when I noticed a small ad in the back, tucked into the “Adult” classifieds. In a plain black box it read: FREE Internet. Beneath it was a phone number: 1-217-792-2PPP.

That number stopped me cold.

217-792 was my town. Population 2,000. Middle of nowhere.

If you grew up then, you memorized phone numbers. That prefix is still burned into my brain. And here it was, printed in a national magazine, quietly offering the thing I wanted most in the world. It felt like finding a golden ticket in a candy bar.

The ad said, “All you pay for is the call.” Which, for me, meant I paid nothing at all.

I clipped it out—carefully removing any evidence that it came from the “Adult” section, which would have ended the experiment immediately as far as my parents were concerned. I plugged in our sluggish fax modem, fumbled through MacPPP or ConfigPPP or FreePPP (the utilities you used to dial and connect) and eventually heard the sweet, grinding handshake of connection. I created my first email address. I loaded my first web page. Slowly. Painfully. Wonderfully.

I was on the real internet.

The company behind it was called Slip Net. There’s almost no trace of it now. It seems to have made its money through those same classified ads, alongside things like “Sexy Modem: The Ultimate BBS.” One of the few remaining breadcrumbs is a mention in TidBITS. They note in the, "Free Service Providers" section, "SLIPNET (shell,slip,ppp) modem -> 217 792 2777 info@slip.net".

TidBITS also played a pretty huge role in getting me online. I bought the famous big yellow book, "Internet Starter Kit" that came with a floppy disc. It taught me how to use the included utilities like FreePPP or ConfigPPP to connect.

From there I wandered. Gopher servers. FTP archives. Tiny text files pulled from distant universities. Later, Hotline servers, trading low-resolution videos that took hours to download. It all felt vast and secret and impossibly alive.

A few years later, my family moved to a bigger city. DSL arrived. Then broadband. The web exploded. Being online stopped feeling like a privilege and started feeling like oxygen. And eventually, like something closer to being in a stranglehold.

Sometimes I think about how strange it is that there was ever a moment when you had to earn access to the internet. When it felt like discovering a hidden room in the world. When it promised possibility more than surveillance or exhaustion.

And no, I never did end up rollerblading through New York City while hacking the planet. But for a brief moment in the mid-90s, it felt like I might.

If anyone reading this knows why a San Francisco–based ISP had servers sitting in Mt. Pulaski, Illinois, I’d love to hear it. It still makes no sense to me thirty years later.

A few years ago, I tracked down old copies of those magazines on eBay and framed the ad as a reminder of when the internet felt young and strange and full of promise.

If you’re curious, Archive.org has scans of some magazines that feature the ads:

MacUser, September 1994

MacUser, January 1996

After posting about the static dashboard to track my 2025 walking mileage, I decided to make a new one for this year—something live, something I could update as I go instead of waiting until December. Now I will log each day’s miles and the totals update automatically, along with a few other stats. You can see how much I walked for any given day. Right now, it's at 4.

It was just a fun little thing to make for me, and it’s oddly motivating. A little gamified. A little obsessive.

I’m proud that I hit my 1,000-mile goal last year. This time around, I’m aiming for consistency. There were a few big holes last year when I didn't walk for weeks. I think even if I can get a mile in each day, that will be a lot better.

View My Walks

View the 2025 Dashboard

Several years ago, I hurt my back. Sciatica pain is no joke. Walking became the fix. I started most mornings with an hour of loops around the park or laps on the YMCA’s indoor track. It became my routine.

This year, I decided to make it official. I set a goal: 1,000 miles. I tracked every walk using a simple setup—Apple Watch for the movement, Soulver for the math. I liked that it stayed out of the way. No social layer. No badges. Just numbers adding up, quietly.

I built a small dashboard to track it all. Nothing fancy. Just a record of the miles, the days, the streaks. A reminder that small, boring consistency adds up.

I usually went out between 6:30 and 7:00 a.m. and walked for about an hour. Toward the end of the year, I had to stretch some days longer to make up ground. December became a stretch of seven-mile mornings. Earlier in the year, four miles had been the average.

Walking does something reliable for me. It loosens my back. It clears the static. It gives my brain just enough movement to think without spiraling. The surprise this year was how motivating the 1,000 mile goal structure became. Seeing the numbers accumulate made it harder to quit on myself. I had a couple of low stretches—spring and fall especially—where I would have normally drifted off and stopped entirely. But the goal was there, quiet and patient, waiting.

So I kept going.

I’m proud of the accomplishment and excited that January 1 is only a few days away and I’ll be starting the tally all over again for 2026.

View the 2025 Dashboard

Three walks worth reading

You Are Here

David Nicholls

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Open City

Teju Cole

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Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir

Craig Mod

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Jon Hicks launched a new site last week that hit me in a way the internet almost never does these days. It’s about the band Stars of the Lid and it’s called Stars of the Lid Forever. He describes it as “a fan-led project to archive their live recordings”. No subscription push. No tracking. No hustle. Just a guy building a home for something he loves.

He also wrote a short blog post about the project. Worth a read. It captures the odd electricity that runs through a very specific obsession.

One of the shows he archived was the April 22, 2008 set in Champaign. Inside a planetarium. I was there and I don’t think I’ve experienced anything quite like seeing Stars of the Lid with a full dome show spinning above us. Jon asked if he could include the poster I made for it. That print was the first screen printed gig poster I ever designed. As a kid who spent hours a day scanning through the original gigposters.com, that was quite a milestone for me. Still the one people mention most often when they look through my work. They like the scooter guy.

In early 2008 I was a year into designing show posters and quarter-page newspaper ads for The Canopy Club. The office sat in the middle of the University of Illinois campus. Parking was expensive and limited, so I sold my car and bought a 50cc scooter that looked like it had been designed by a toy company. It could carry groceries under the seat. Chinese takeout lived in the backpack. I remember riding it to the AT&T store the morning I bought the first iPhone, then heading straight back to the Canopy office to jailbreak it so I could swap the icons and wallpaper. I felt like my life was finally doing something interesting. I was working in the middle of the hyper buzz of a live music venue while there were also so many exciting things going on with the web and technology before the technology and web made us all so isolated and lonely.

Working on my new site this week and digging through old files has me feeling a little nostalgic. Remembering who I was when I made that poster. 2008 was a wild little window. My first year working on what was then called Pygmalion Music Festival. Yo La Tengo headlined. I was full time at a music venue and working with Seth at smilepolitey.com and doing some other related things. I was learning how to make things that meant something to me and maybe to other people too. I also made four or five prints that year.

It’s funny how a fan project can pull you back into the version of yourself who thought anything was possible. It reminded me what I cared about back then. And maybe pointed a little at where I should aim myself now.

Working Drafts*. A blog. Or whatever we call these things now that “blog” feels so old fashioned.

Sharing things in public has never come naturally to me. Outside of the design work I have done for other people, I am not especially present online. But a corner of the internet I actually own, my domain, my files, my words, feels a little magical. No platforms. No algorithms. In 2025 this format feels both incredibly archaic and, for someone who grew up on the early web, weirdly correct.

Wax Era is the home for my design work first, so there is really no pressure for this blog to become anything huge. Let it be loose. Let it become whatever it becomes. That seems like the only sane way to start.

I decided to set a few guardrails, mostly to keep myself from drifting into places I do not want to go:

• No thought leadership. No guru posture. Nothing that smells like a TED Talk or LinkedIn evangelizing.
• No forced cheer about how I am crushing it.
• No SEO tricks, no cross posting, no algorithmic manipulation.
• And no confessional oversharing. I want to be human and present without sliding into melodrama.

What I do want is a home for the things I am drawn to. You can see the rough set of topics in the sidebar, which will give you a sense of what is coming. There will be design talk. There will be some sports, mostly from the angle of uniforms and visual identity. There will be posts about computers and software. I read a lot and also am interested in the design of book covers, so that will show up here as well. In short, there are many interests I hope to carry through to this space.

So this is the starting point for the experiment. I will end this first post with a quote from one of my favorite novelists, Douglas Coupland, from his book Life After God. I am sure he will come up again here before long.

“I have always tried to speak with a voice that has no regional character—a voice from nowhere. This is because I have never really felt like I was “from” anywhere; home to me, as I have said, is a shared electronic dream of cartoon memories, half-hour sitcoms and national tragedies. I have always prided myself on my lack of accent—my lack of any discernible regional flavor. I used to think mine was a Pacific Northwest accent, from where I grew up, but then I realized my accent was simply the accent of nowhere—the accent of a person who has no fixed home in their mind.”

Life After God

Douglas Coupland

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