Technical & editorial info
Technical
This site is optimized for viewing in Internet Explorer 7+ and Firefox 2+, and should look okay in Internet Explorer 6+, Opera, Netscape, and Safari. Let me know if the site looks screwed up on your browser.
The code is fully validated XHTML 1.0 Strict according to the W3C Markup Validation Service.
The CSS for this site has also been validated by the W3C CSS Validation Service, with the exception of the changed scrollbar colors you will see if you view the site in Internet Explorer. The W3C says that’s a no-no, but I like it.
Thanks to The Lone Rider and Conan Reis for help with the images on this site.
Editorial
The first in the series of columns that would (in 2001) come to be known as Wasting My Youth was published in The Peak, Simon Fraser University’s student newspaper, on November 30 1998. The last was published on April 8 2002. In between, it was as if the heavens opened up and poured glistening manna upon the parched Earth. Or something like that.
When I put together the WMY manuscript in 2003-4, some pieces were plunked in more or less exactly the way they originally appeared in The Peak, while others were substantially expanded or revised. A number of pieces were either completed or written from scratch for the manuscript, many of which were behind-the-scenes war stories from my career in student journalism.
I generally went with the most recent version of each piece for this archive, so depending on circumstances an individual piece here may reflect the original published version, the original pre-layout draft before it was mangled by an editor or cut down for space reasons, the week-after “I-hated-it-the-moment-it-hit-the-stands” revision, or the 2003-4 manuscript version.
In most cases I think the best version of each piece is what you see here, but hey, I could be wrong.
This online archive—the first of many quality UFAland web sites—went online on June 11 2007. Very few changes were made when I marked the material up for this archive—just the odd correction or polish here and there. I sincerely hope that I will not find it necessary to touch this crap again, as I have moved on from Wasting My Youth.
If you have any questions, concerns or comments, feel free to contact me.