Santa Cruz County Place Name: Vue de L'Eau (July 22, 2026)
One of the very few French place names in the county. This was a gazebo type structure with a pagoda style roof that was built along the cliff above Monterey Bay in 1892 as part of a promotion scheme of the Santa Cruz, Garfield Park & Beach trolley line. It was advertised as an “observatory, cliff house, waiting station, and depot.” Nearby was the Casino at the junction of Cliff Drive and Garfield Avenue (now West Cliff Drive and Woodrow Avenue). Vue de L’Eau, with its spectacular view of the ocean (hence, the name), became a popular attraction, but it slowly faded in interest and in 1905 Vue de L’Eau and six surrounding acres were bought for the winter quarters of the Norris and Rowe circus. The building burned in 1925.
Bratton Online
Bruce Bratton (RIP) is a major figure in the social and political history of Santa Cruz. For decades, my wife Gunilla functioned as his editrix / webmistress, handling all the nuts and bolts of publishing his column online every week via Bratton Online. He passed on a while back, at 91, after long and illustrious career of being a thorn in the side of the establishment (and getting fired from every then existent local publication for not censoring his opinions about big advertisers like the Seaside Company, owner of the Beach Boardwalk and most of Beach Flats), but the motley crew of curmudgeonly contributors he gathered as contributors over the years has continued to publish the column, joined by a select few new conspirators, including myself.
My contribution, oddly enough given my political inclinations, is to write a column on the history of Santa Cruz, keeping with the theme introduced by the Covello & Covello Historical photo featured at the head of every column. Each week, I feature a selection of interesting and historically significant places in Santa Cruz County, through the lens of Donald Thomas Clark's wonderful book, Santa Cruz County Place Names: A Geographical Dictionary, originally published in 1986 by the Santa Cruz Historical Trust, now a unit of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (SC MAH).
I'll be posting my columns here under the "place names" tag, just for easy future reference.
Tags: columns, place-names, bratton-online, santa-cruz, history, adventures
Linux Tools
Some of the tools I use to manage / operate this site and server (and others). Will be updated as I think of things to add.
The server this run on is a minimal DigitalOcean "droplet" running i Ubuntu Linux . $4/mo.
Secure Shell (ssh) is great (vast improvement, security-wise, on telnet, which is what I started my career with), Mosh improves it considerably.
The web server running on this system is Apache (nothing exotic), was the easiest to get PHP running on (used with another project hosted on this server, www.gospelofthomas.net).
My shell environment is "bash". Default. I have and do use other shells, such as "ksh" (what I started with on Sun Solaris) and "zsh" (what I use on my desktop, an iMac running MacOS).
Tags: tools, linux, bash, apache, mosh, digitalocean, ubuntu
Simple Content Management Tools
As a command line, text editor oriented techie, I favor tools that require a minimum of infrastructure, complexity, overhead. For instance, when I create a Wiki, I use DokuWikiwhen I want to create a wiki (did this for a gaming clan I was running a while ago).
"DokuWiki is a simple to use and highly versatile Open Source wiki software that doesn't require a database. It is loved by users for its clean and readable syntax. The ease of maintenance, backup and integration makes it an administrator's favorite."
I'm a vi fan (actually, these days, it's vim or gvim [built in GUI]), have been using it ever since I encountered the vilearn tutorial at Cabrillo College (the local junior college) back in 1993, when I was hanging out with a friend as he installed a VAX running BSD (the original UC Berkeley version) that had been donated to the campus by UCSC (University of California, Santa Cruz).
All this is by way of saying, when I started looking around for tools to manage a blog a few years back, I wanted something much less complicated than typical CMS / blog systems like WordPress (which requires an SQL database on the backend, and constant maintenance and updates to avoid being hacked). I looked around, and found the software being used to create this blog, Bash Blog. From the programmer:
"I wanted a very, very simple way to post entries to a blog by using a public folder on my server, without any special requirements and dependencies."
Perfect!
Tags: dokuwiki, bash-blog, vi, vim, gvim, history, tools
Linux Command Line Fun
So, way, way back in the day, we're talking the early 1990s, I wound up as a Unix sysadmin (HP-UX, to be precise, colliquially known as "hocky pux"). One of the standard "tools" that was included with every Unix distribution is the "fortune" command, which spits out a random selection from a large database of quotes of varying origins. Standard practice, since the days of yore, has been to have this run when you login (and sometimes log out) of your command line shell. Something like "motd" (message of the day), but personalized.
One of my little side programming projects has been to take fortune, and mash it up with a variety of other related tools (cowsay and lolcat).
- aafire
- boxes
- cmatrix
- cowsay / cowthink
- figlet
- fortune
- lolcat
- rev
- sl
- toilet
Tags: linux, bash, login, logout, ascii, ascii-animation, aafire, boxes, cmatrix, cowsay, cowthink, figlet, fortune, lolcat, rrev, sl, toilet
Links
You can find me on the following social media (for a start):
I'm also on the bad place (yes, I haven't nuked my account there, yet), but we don't talk about that.
Other items of note:
- Space.Org, Inc. - my current start up, co-founded with a brilliant engineer, former co-worker, John McEntee
- 880 IT Services, LLC - my IT Consulting Firm
- Gospel of Thomas.Net - fun little side project
- PHP Fortune NEO - PHP implementation of the classic Unix/Linux "fortune" program
Tags: links, social-media
Welcome!
A long, long, very gosh darned long time ago in a galaxy far, far, very gosh danged far away (May of 1994), I co-founded Web Communications, LLC with Chris Schefler (RIP). It was the world's first self-service web hosting company, and fairly successful. We sold it to Verio Communications in February of 1999 for quite a few pennies, most of which I no longer have.
Since then, it's been a long, strange trip. I currently split my time between being a freelance IT Consultant through my LLC, 880 IT Services, teaching IT career education in the evenings part time at Yavapai College as Adjunct Faculty, and running my latest startup, Space.Org, Inc. (I registered that domain in August of 1995, when were testing out our new domain registration service at WebCom).
Tags: welcome-post