Bento Box

I recently got back in touch with my friend Aziz who I’ve known since freshman year of highschool. During one of our conversations Aziz mentioned the name of the first teacher we shared: Ron Latin.

To everyone else this name is innocuous, but to us, it conjures up memories of 28.8k modems, flashing gifs, 300dpi scanners, and horrific MIDI encrusted webpages. You see, our beloved teacher Ron taught a class on HTML and computer apps but did so in a manner that was most certainly a danger to our sanity, but more importantly, a danger to the internet.

His methodology for teaching HTML was to steal other people’s source code and just modify what he needed and claim it as his own. Under many circumstances this wouldn’t be so bad, but he did it in such a way that made your eyes bleed.

Thanks to the technology of the wayback machine we can explore his glorious website which he used as an example to follow.

Multiple archives – knock yourself out – just dont click on any of the java links! I wrote 3 long paragraphs and then accidently clicked it and I lost all my writing when my browser crashed. It was archived in 1998 but it’s been up since before 1996.

While I was in his class, I found the Ron to be so laughable that I decided to make a website spoofing him. It makes me smile to see how my scathing sarcasm was stayed with me through the years. Apparently sarcasm is lost on him and he found the spoof website to be so complimentary that he mirrored it on his site. C’mon, the spoof website had crap like:

Reasons why I love Ron Latin so:

• Ron is so funny! have you ever seen his “hot flash,” it was so funny! I haven’t ever seen anything on the web like it!
• Ron is handsome too! I love his round body, soft, and cushiony body.
• I wish I could really meet Ron Latin, I feel like I already know him!

…and to this day I’m still complimenting people on their websites (blogs) about how great their lives must be. In a way, I am jealous of their ignorance, but that’s still overshadowed by the sick pleasure I get from making fun of someone to their face and they don’t even know it. Message me on AIM if you want to see some recent comments somechick and I have left someone’s blog.

And if you can’t get enough of horrible websites from the 90s, check out this site I made for my brother in ‘95. I was 12 at the time (I later updated it to say I was 13). My brother wanted me to make the website for him to supplement all the chatting he was doing on IRC trying to meet girls. I wish they archived the picture of him standing next to his accord, or the one of him flexing.