Sixteen years ago on this very day the CBA’s web site was launched. So much has changed since then, and yet so little. Our board of directors has completely turned over, and not just once, since then; yet many of the men and women who sat around that table month after month continue to work tirelessly, in different jobs and with less visibility. Our central focus, the annual Fathers Day Festival, is almost unrecognizable from the one held in 1999; yet so many of the traditions going back more than four decades remain the same, as do those magnificent Ponderosa pines at the Nevada County Fairgrounds.
And cbaontheweb.org, now cbaweb.org, has morphed and morphed and morphed again. Remember the bot attacks, the lone-wolf idiot “lower case man” on the Message Board, the zany contests and Mold Man…yet the site still serves as a place for us to come together each day, sharing the good news and the bad, celebrating the Association’s accomplishments and mourning the loss of our brothers and sisters. All different and changed yet all just the same as that Halloween morning back in ‘00.
I’ve been the web master these past sixteen years, have risen before sunrise each day to add fresh content, fix problems reported during the night and dream up goofy ideas to cajole visitors to come back tomorrow and the next and the next. Of all my jobs over the years as a CBA volunteer, this has been my favorite, and now that I’m retired from my “day job,” it means even more to me. Though I’m no longer on the board, miss most meetings and have fallen off the leadership team telephone tree, our Internet presence and my role in it has, in many ways, kept me smack in the middle of things. And I like it that way.
Thank you board, than you members, for entrusting me with this job. Don’t know if I could get through my morning coffee without posting a new Welcome column or fixing a broken link.