DAN CONDERMAN ============= Dan Conderman is a Wisconsin builder, artist, broadcaster, technologist, writer, experimenter, webmaster, and lifelong Internet enthusiast. He performs and releases music as DJRC and operates Nitetime.net as an independent creative and technical environment. His relationship with computers began when obtaining one still felt like an event. Gateway machines arrived in cow-patterned boxes. Pentium processors were exciting. Modems were standard equipment but the network was not yet an invisible utility. To use the Internet, you deliberately dialed somewhere else. You went there. A family computer might run Lemmings or Doom, then become a doorway to IRC, Usenet, Netscape, downloadable software, and links whose destinations nobody in the room could predict. Computer boxes appearing at another house meant another family had joined the Information Superhighway. That period supplied more than nostalgia. It established a durable idea: the Internet is most interesting when ordinary people can own and operate distinct corners of it. THE WEBMASTER'S CRAFT --------------------- Dan also worked through an earlier era of Web construction. A Photoshop mockup might have to be sliced into many images, fitted into framesets or nested tables, and held together with repeating backgrounds. Later, elaborate DIV structures supplied borders, corners, shadows, and layout behavior that browsers did not yet make easy. Those methods required a peculiar visual engineering instinct: look at a flat design, see the pieces it must become, and predict how those pieces will behave when a browser starts pulling on them. CSS, capable browsers, and frameworks eventually absorbed whole categories of those tricks. Dan described the obsolete skills as being "like tears in rain." The deeper skill survived. It was never merely slicing a graphic. It was knowing how to make a digital place feel like something. Nitetime is the current form of that craft. THE BUILDER INSIDE THE CONTAINER -------------------------------- Computing, broadcasting, radio, music, painting, film, woodworking, writing, and Wisconsin folklore all fit inside Nitetime because the container is broad enough to accommodate the person building it. That breadth is not a lack of focus. The connections are the focus.