web design and development

Stumpworld and The Accidental Web Developer

I never meant to be a web developer. I was going for rock star but my band turned into a web development company.

I was a rock guitar player in Boston for 8 years, made a bunch of albums, toured, never got a deal… we couldn’t sing, bark and yell and run around like maniacs yes, sing, not really. It was more about friends and music than it was about business and selling so… Wigg, The Dinosaur, and I had a good time but never really polished the act. My last project with Hell Toupee was appropriately titled “Prehygenic Rock Slop” and was awesome.

The next band was called Squid! With non other than Squid Lips himself. One day Squidlly brought home 4 286 PCs and a bunch of other cool stuff. His job as “techie” for a medical refferal company in the early 90s paid well AND and when they upgraded he got all their old stuff. We had an Amiga in the house and it had the Disney animation software which was so cool… floating vector art was brand new, Toasters and such. But then, over night, the Squidalicousness hooked up an entire LAN network with an email server, a Linux file server and the internet. Stumpworld the house became Stumpworld Inc. the web development company.

I started with Corel Draw , 3D Studio, Photoshop 2, and TextPad. GIFTRANS!

Then they met the Dragon Lady. Naah, she was OK but I still don’t believe the Hendrix story. She had worked with The Police, U2 and some others but wanted out of music and into technology. She hooked us up with Aerosmith and we did their first web site, the Space Donut. I designed Aerosmith’s first homepage. Whoo Hoo. Never met them once. SquidButt got to hang with them several times. I talked to Tom on the phone once, he was having IRQ problems with a new game controller.

Then we did Phish, and Blue Note Records and MMW, Rolling Stones, more Aerosmith… but Squid and Zoon had other plans. Plans going back before the Dragon Lady. Zoon was making Online Merchant, a dektop app. that generated an e-commerce website.

Then I guess we got some money because we all moved out of the extra bedrooms and into an office building. Then came Ri and Buyitonline.com. Buyitonline.com was a portal to stores built with Online Merchant.

Company exploded to 60 employees. Was bought for XX million dollars by a big fish from Canada. We all got big raises, big titles, and big stock options. The next year everything crashed. Stock options became worthless, everyone got laid off. I still have a Marshall Stack, a Les Paul, a Telecaster, and a B.C.Rich Mockingbird… and a pretty good web design business too.

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