JD’s Bunker
JD’s Bunker is the ancestor of JDPendry.com. The Bunker began in late 1997 on a free web hosting platform named Geocities. It remained there until Geocities faded away into cyber space. At that point the transition in my aged cranial hard drive is a little fuzzy, but Command Sergeant Major (Retired) Dan Elder offered to host the Bunker on one of his activities named Virtual Battalion Headquarters (vbnhq.com). JD’s Bunker continued there and additionally Dan provided me a forum for JD’s Bunker on his popular NCO Website. Circa 2005, Dan chopped his websites (minus the often politically incorrect Bunker)and much accumulated knowledge and expertise to the Army (I believe that is a correct characterization of it) as they were forming Army Knowledge Base communities which were in their infancy. Fortunately for the Army, Dan had a significant head start was an important part of that. Dan is a pioneer in that arena.
Following all of that, I started JDPendry.com and continued JD’s Bunker. That was going full speed with a reasonable amount of subscribers and traffic until December 23, 2008 when I was involved in a serious automobile accident. From then through 2009, there was no activity at JDPendry.com. Subscriber base, web traffic, etc all dwindled to nothing. While I was about to give up on the pursuit altogether, Dan again offered to host JDPendry.com on his webhosting service at Topsarge.com now MILMEDIA. We began anew in 2010. Since then JDPendry.com has existed as a place for me to write some when time, my demanding day job, and life in general permitted. Goes without saying that it was sporadic. There has never been an attempt to commercialize the site, but the times they are a changin’. On June 30, 2016, I retired from my second career and now hope to embark on a third in the written media and maybe into other platforms as well. Who knows? Doc tells me I have to keep the cranial hard drive busy otherwise they’ll be fitting me with a drool bib or for a coffin.
As you might imagine from 1998 to 2008 there was a large volume of material posted in JD’s Bunker addressing Army issues, social issues, politics, and Americana. From this page, I hope to reconstruct and open a door to the old Bunker with the original archived material (except for what might have resided on some long lost floppy disc). It provides quite a commentary on the times and offers some decent leadership lessons for those interested.
You may find the html coding amateurish and shockingly simple by today’s standards, but in the days these pages were created you were mostly self-taught and hand jammed every page.
As I complete reconstruction of each of the old Bunker Pages, I will put links here. Maybe you will find something you like. Keep an eye out, more to come. Bunker Chapel | Bunker Poetry | NCO Duties and Responsibilities
Category: Politics
This thread is very lonely so I thought I’d drop by and say hello. Hello. Actually, JD, I thought your occasional pieces were guest written for TAH exclusively and that your copyright thingy was you being funny. Whoops.
Floppies? Well, it’s nice to know that I’m not the only person left on the island with floppy discs.
I’ve got some and a whole box of those nifty rainbow colored plastic ones.
I’ve got tons of 5 1/4″ as well as 3 1/2″ disks. Also have a PC, XT, and AT in the bedroom. There’s a couple of Compaqs from when they were a real company, and a couple Heath/Zeniths.
I have some 8″ floppy dics left over from a DEC PDP-11 I used 30 years ago.
No one can read the data on them anymore, but it is safely stored on the disc!
Now, the 100+ year-old books I have still have retrievable data. Just sayin’.
Had a guy at work that used to put his 8 inch floppies in his desk drawer. Any time he left his desk he would put the desk phone in the same drawer. Didn’t take long for him to learn a valuable lesson when his discs got erased every time the phone rang while he was away. Yeah, we had a hand in it.
Out of curiosity, I did a view source on the NCO Duties page, and found it simple HTML which still renders remarkably well despite the use of *gasp* “table” markup. Something that likely can’t be said now for 80 percent of pages developed at the time.
Back in the day, for example, it wasn’t unusual to run across some really convoluted HTML generated by Microsoft Word. One of the amusing features of Dreamweaver when it was a Macromedia web development tool was a feature called “Clean MS Word.”
For anybody faced with the prospect of having to work with a lot of old HTML code, I would humbly suggest a couple of basic resources that might save time and a few headaches. The first is the usefulness of a pro grade text editor. I’ve used UltraEdit for years and swear by it. YMMV.
Another resource that’s been useful is the online Smashing Magazine which despite the goofy Brit name is actually a fairly thoughtful site for web design. Although it leans towards the artsy fartsy, it wouldn’t be unusual to, say, run across a discussion where somebody geeks out on Pantone colors, the writers don’t seem to be pretentious buttheads about it.
Ah, Pantone… at one point the gold standard for color shades in the computer business. Did have a rather flaky Taiwanese supplier once – when asked if he used Pantone Matching System, PMS, he just shook his head and said “No, but my girlfriend’s doctor said she had it last month.” True story.
Thanks for the heads-up on the site. It’s always nice to find resources like that.
Yes, Word did come up with some God-awful html templates in the same way Visual C came up with yuge code for a simple “Hello world” program.
I use TextPad myself. Ver’ nice.
Well all I can say is, “Thank you, Command Sergeant Major,” for top billing on your poetry page. I am indeed both flattered and honored. It will be good to have more of your work here, JD.
Thanks for your contributions, JD, here, there, and everywhere else.
Love it JD, saved/bookmarked your homepage for more future view and ejumacation. Personally I prefer the old school html, the ever changing new stuff CONSTANTLY fails to load on the page properly. (read: ” it’s shit”)
I recognize this archived website; I recall seeing it when I was a young Corporal in 1999. In fact, I bought a copy of “Three Meter Zone” at the MCSS in K’town (or it might have been Bliss a few years later). There’s always so much you can learn when folks give you stuff to read.
Got it bookmarked… love your contributions here, JD – ope to keep seeing them here and at your website in the future.
Definitely hand-coded! But still looks nice, JD. Makes me realize how much packages like WordPress or Moveable Type have contributed to blogging.
If you use the link I include to my (currently quiescent) blog, it’s easy to get to my own website, also pretty much self-designed back around 2002. I like to keep things simple.