Oh, the Transient Internet!

I just spent well over an hour updating links inside my resumes, and let me tell you, it wasn’t easy.  I don’t think that anyone ever clicks on those links (they’re mostly linked to programs and press releases from shows I’ve been in, more or less to prove I’m not making these things up), but the way I see it, if I’m going to have links at all, they may as well work!  Nothing ever stays the same, and this is triply true of anything on the internet.  The University of Hawaii at Manoa’s theatre website underwent a total move and re-vamp in the past year, and by virtue of this, not a single link to my thesis performance information was active, and as usual, that was only the tip of the iceberg.  Quite a few of the other sites I had linked to had disappeared, moved, or been specifically removed by newspapers that no longer have free archives.  Really, I find myself wishing I had printed everything out and made a plain-old scrapbook like one of my thesis committee members suggested.  How foolish I was!  There I was thinking that a website was worth ten scrapbooks, and the head of my committee agreed wholeheartedly.  It was 2011, after all.   In the computer age, shouldn’t a website be more useful, more convenient and accessible to a wider audience?  Well, in a way, I suppose I had a point, but in the meantime, the Black Box festival website has so many broken links to reviews and press releases that it makes me go cross-eyed just thinking about it, I spent most of my fourth-of-July this year fixing links pertaining to my out-of-print novels, and for an unknown length of time nearly all the links in my resumes were completely useless.  I seriously did not notice until this morning.

I suppose my ultimate point is that the internet is a wonderful and useful tool, but I am finding that it isn’t what one could call dependable.  Oh well!  For the time being, it looks like things are more or less in order.  Now it’s time for an iced tea break.  -E.G.D.