jonandnic.com - classic edition

Our version of our homepage on the web that's friendly to old browsers and devices - find more friendly old-web sites here.
Visit often for more SSL-free, HTML4-happy, dial-up-optimized content -- that's right, this page is "Under Construction!"

Or if you've got a newer device handy, and want to learn more about us, visit our main home on the web: jonandnic dot com

Main Menu (work in progress)

About Us

We're Jon and Nicole -- although this site is made by Jon, so its mostly full of my interests. We live in Ohio with our kids, but we're from Ontario, Canada. We've also lived in Seattle, Washington, and Albany, New York. Nic is a stay-at-home mom, who volunteers at church and with the kids' school. I'm a technololgy leader, who's had a variety of roles at different big (and some small) companies doing everything from software development, to business development, to product management. Most of my career has been in manufacturing technology, but I've had a few exercusions into consumer tech, as well.

Travel

We love to travel! Here's an image map of some of the places we've been. Click on a region for more details:

Tech

One of my favorite topics! Since this is a retro site, here's some delicious retro tech...

Classic Macs are little works of art! Design is made better through constraint, and the original Macs had to pack functionality and beauty into the very constrained technology of the day. Restoring an old Mac makes for a challenging, but doable project, with plenty of documentation found online, and most of the parts still available -- either through harvesting a dead Mac, or reproduction by other fans.

While restoring and re-selling is fun (but not particularly profitable) I keep my original Mac Plus, upgraded with an external SD2SCSI drive, a Twentieth Anniversary Mac "bridge" machine, and a G4 Cube, as permanently useful members of my collection. I'm also typing this on a PowerBook G3 (Firewire). My main workstation is an early 2008 Mac Pro Tower.

Networking Classic Apple Computers: a write-up on my efforts to get my retro gear onto a modern network

Classic consoles are interesting too. Again, a lot of attention was paid to design -- both the industrial design of the system, and of packing technology in at a low cost. Early CD-based systems are fun to collect, since you can usually try out old games just by burning a CD. My favorites are the Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar (although I still can't afford the CD add-on), and the Dreamcast. But I keep a backward compatible PS3 around, for the odd PlayStation game I want to try out.

LaserDiscs are like vinyl for movies!

OK, not quite... but they are still retro-tastic. Big, beautiful cover art, high res (for its time) video, and fantastic surround-sound (even by today's standards!) Other advantages: if you stop paying your Netflix subscription, you can still watch your LaserDisc movies, and sometimes its the only way to watch the original unedited version (I'm looking at you, George Lucas!)

Just hooking them up to a modern home theater is a fun exercise in itself. A RF AC-3 decoder and upscaler are a must, and seeing a big old LaserDisc player along-side a modern A/V receiver is totally cool!

This page exists so some of that old tech has a place to go online. While the HTML is old, newer isn't always better. The web is a lot worse place than it was in the 90s: Facebook and Google exploit us for our personal data, people manipulate the media as a way to control us, trolls aren't new but getting "doxed" or "swatted" is -- and its awful. We don't need TLS1.2 to make it good again, we just need a simpler, kinder web, and maybe a barrier to entry that keeps the riff-raff out. You can read this site on your iPhone X plus, or you can read it on an Amiga, or original Macintosh. However you got here, be a part of a better web.

Ministry

We're "professional lay volunteers" at both our local church, in the global Church. You can find us service on Sundays, and supporting missions around the world every chance we get! Here's some of our church/family: