As announced a few weeks ago, The Knight Shift is undergoing some major renovation/rejuvenation/regeneration. If this site (and that IS what this is now, a full-bore website with real hosting) looks a bit wonky at times fret not! It is just I, your friend and humble narrator, tinkering on the other side of your screen. It seems that my basic HTML skills are as sharp as ever, I have lost nothing at all in the three decades since I first learned how to make web pages. But I’ve never used WordPress until now and there’s something of a learning curve. I wound up asking ChatGPT for themes appropriate for a personal blog, and it listed a few possibilities. This theme you’re currently looking at is MorningTime and it’s being a real pleasure to build with it.

And just for old time’s sake, here is the “weird spinning head of Chris Knight” that I made in the apartment my friend Ed and I had when we were in college. It was really easy to make. We set my film camera on a tripod, I sat in Ed’s office chair, and we took several shots of me as I swiveled the chair around. I took the film to get developed, brought the prints to the academic computing department at Elon, got the pics scanned and sent those images to my Unix account. When I got home I downloaded the images (with an FTP client), opened up GIF Construction Set and went to work.

I bet all of what I just described could be done in less than five minutes by someone today, with nothing but a smartphone. Telling you kids right now, you have NO idea what kind of Wild West the early Internet was.

That’s pretty much it. Just need to be forgiving for a little while longer and this site will look and function amazing.