About the Webmaster 
(Last updated Feb. 21, 2009)
You might say I’m just blowing my own horn, but it’s my website and if I want to puff myself up a little, what the hell? The reader deserves to know who’s behind those thousands of words and hundreds of photographs (over 1,300 at the moment) that I keep flogging every time I spam you with emails touting a new or updated page on this website.
In 1985, after three years of living in India (at a time when cyber technology was nothing more than a gleam in Rajiv Gandhi’s eye) I was completely clueless about this new computer phenomenon that eventually would take journalism by storm. I was handed my first “computer,” a little Radio Shack Tandy TRS-80 laptop that operated on four AA batteries, didn’t even have a hard drive, had only 24K bytes of random access memory and a little “screen” about 1 ½ inches high on which you could write about four lines of type at a time on a barely readable, unlighted liquid crystal display. It had a miniscule 2.4 MHz of speed and you had to save your files onto an external floppy drive quickly because the memory would disappear before you knew it. It could just barely be called a computer, and by today’s standards would be nothing more than a primitive word processor. But we called them computers.
That said, this old “Trash 80,” as we journalists
nicknamed them, changed my life forever because it was soon followed by the
Tandy 200 laptop (bigger screen, slightly more memory) and then eventually by
proper desktop CPUs with hard drives, a DOS operating system for which you had
to remember scores of command lines, a monotone (green) screen and a somewhat
dodgy modem with which we sometimes were able to file stories via packet
switching through our London office—providing you were able to get a clear enough
phone line to London. In some Third World countries I regularly visited that
was a pretty big “if.” But it was a whole lot better than the decrepit old
telex machines on which for years I had to re-keyboard all of my stories on
perforated paper tape, or, before that, make nightly trips
to the PTT (Post, Telephone and Telegraph) offices in numerous African, Asian and Middle East countries, where I had to cajole or bribe reluctant bureaucrats (who usually spoke no known language) into tape-punching and sending my dispatches to Washington via a “press collect” telegram. While covering the 1978-79 revolution in Iran I used to tell people I had a nine-to-five job: From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. I would be out in the streets of Tehran running around with revolutionaries, trying not to get shot by trigger-happy soldiers of Shah Reza Pahlavi’s Army, and from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. (during the curfew) I would be in the telex room of the Hotel Intercontinental punching a tape and trying desperately to hold a telephone connection long enough to send my story to Washington. This, of course, was long before anyone had heard of personal computers. Sometimes I had to rely on “pigeons,” or people flying out of a disaster area or any location without telecommunications, to carry out my typewritten dispatches and deliver them to a Reuter office for telexing. My Los Angeles Times colleague, Rone Tempest, reminds me of the days we wrote stories of the Bhopal, India, gas disaster on portable typewriters perched on the hood of a car and then raced to the airport and desperately begged Indian Airlines flight crews to “pigeon” our stories to New Delhi.
The advent of laptops
was also great for circumventing government censors in those countries that
tried to control the news media. They could control a telex machine operator in
a post 
office or hotel, but
dealing with billions of scrambled data bits flying over telephone lines or,
later, through satellite dishes was a bit much for the censors.
From the technically-primitive background of a Tandy owner, I gradually morphed from hard core Luddite to IT whiz and by 1995, while living in Los Angeles as West Coast bureau chief, I was hosting my own, cutting-edge “Talk with Bill Claiborne About California” chat page on The Washington Post’s pioneering Internet newspaper web site, which then was called “Digital Ink.” I was learning the ins and outs of advanced cyber technology, and it was only a short tick on the learning curve from there to eventually creating my own web site, “The Claibornes’ Australian Website,” which, dear reader, you are now looking at and wondering “how long is this idiot going to keep banging on about himself?”
Yours truly at telex at Beirut’s Commodore Hotel in 1983
Well, a bit longer, because I can hear some of you
clamoring for more. Below is a small demonstration of the technological
heights to which I’ve risen since being given my first, primitive Tandy TRS-80.
Besides creating this web site, I’ve been doing things like downloading,
ripping and burning Mp3 music tracks from California and New York City Jazz FM
stations that broadcast on the Internet, and playing them on my iPod. Lately, I
bought a little blue-tooth transmitter with which I relay live Internet radio
music from my computer to a little receiver plugged into my living room stereo
system. So, Alma and I can sit here on the far side of the world and listen
live to radio stations all over the world. I also have a mobile phone
(cellphone to Americans) that I can use to jump onto the Internet and download
email or whatever. Moreover, I’ve been playing with Google Earth and recently downloaded
satellite photographs of the first and last places in which I lived in the United States before we moved to Australia, and also a satellite image of our current home.
Above, doing it the old way in Ladakh,in the Himalayas, circa 1984
What’s the point of all this? Well, I turned 73 in February, 2009. Who says you can’t teach old dogs new tricks?
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First home: 14 E. 90th St., Manhattan, is marked by red X. The big Episcopal church next door is where I went to kindergarten. Central Park is where we played. The black part of the park in the photo is the reservoir. The circular building around the corner from our apartment is the Guggenheim Museum. Fifth Avenue is between our building and Central Park .
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Last U.S. Home: The yellow X marks our apartment in downtown Chicago, on the corner of Huron and Clark streets, in the heart of the restaurant district and just six blocks from my office, which was in the historic Chicago Tribune building on Michigan Avenue, across the street from the equally famous Wrigley Building. We rode our bicycles everywhere in Chicago and left our car sitting in our apartment building’s garage. |
Today’s home: In Davis Street, Carlton North, in Melbourne, Australia. Once again we opted for the urban lifestyle. We can walk to everything in bustling Melbourne, or take one of two tram lines very near our house to downtown. The lively Rathdowne Street (2 doors away) has lots of good cafes, bistros, shops etc. As was the case in Chicago, we use the car only when absolutely necessary. The rest of the time we walk or take public transportation. |
