Recently, there has been renewed interest in the Stupid Computer Tricks website I published a few years ago.

I was contacted recently by Bill Detwiler from TechRepublic after he encountered one of the pirated versions of the original SCT website. Bill was interested in publishing an article about SCT on his blog. I agreed, and sent him the (updated) website files. You can view it by clicking the link below.

This page is just a quick history of the SCT "experience" for those that are interested.

I retired the SCT website a couple years ago for a number of reasons. I do not plan on resurrecting it; at least not in its prior form. I would ask that if you enjoyed Bill's article and the photos that you choose to view it there, and send your referrals there, rather than the several "pirated" versions published without my permission by a few unethical webmasters.

Thank You,

Rod Shelley

A Little Stupid History

A Short History of the SCT Experience

From 1994 to 2002 I worked as a PC technician for Gateway. For the first 4 months, I worked on the 1-800 tech support phones. I will soak my clothes in gasoline and march through hell before I put myself through that kind of torture again. When Gateway decided to open a factory outlet store in Kansas City, I transferred to the service center of what would later become the Overland Park, Kansas Gateway Country Store.

After seeing all kinds of wacky, operator-induced computer issues, I decided to start documenting them just as a way to share the humor with friends & family.

During 2000, I opened a photo album account at Photopoint.com, which at the time was a free service. One of the albums I had there was called "Stupid Computer Tricks." It began getting a lot of attention, and was even the subject of an article in the Photopoint Magazine in December, 2000. You can read the article here (PDF).

A few months thereafter, Photopoint ended the free service, and being the cheapskate I am, I removed all my albums. I had just registered my first domain, shelleyphoto.com, and decided to place the Stupid Computer Tricks there.

One evening in early 2002, I checked my e-mail, and was shocked to see nearly 200 messages downloading. I thought I was the victim of some sort of e-mail attack, but, no. The messages were from people telling me how much they enjoyed my SCT website! I replied to as many messages as I could before my fingers gave out, and asked where they had heard about the site. It turned out that someone had discovered it, and placed the URL in a web forum. From there, it took off in a domino fashion. The site was rapidly being posted on all the techie websites, and being e-mailed all over the world. One of the folks that replied to me said the site was the talk of the AOL Instant Messenger. I guess Warhol was right about the 15 minutes of fame thing!

I didn’t have a hit counter, so I quickly installed one from Bravenet, and was stunned to see it increment by the hundreds every time I refreshed the page! The first night, it logged well over 20,000 hits. While I was thrilled beyond words with the traffic, I began to be concerned with the bandwidth it was using. I really didn’t want to get nailed with a huge overage charge from my hosting service. In hopes of getting a little extra funding to help with these anticipated charges, I added a PayPal donations button. As the hit counter rapidly incremented into the hundreds of thousands of hits, not a dime came in. So I pulled the site. A few folks then donated, and of course a lot more sent me indignant messages regarding asking for donations.

Then I got a message from Stag Hosting out of the UK. They needed traffic to their website, so they offered to host me for free, with no bandwidth worries. I took them up on their offer, and for several months in 2002, SCT resided there. A few months after placing it on Stag Hosting, they had a hacker problem, and the site was down for a while. It finally was brought back up, but I was thereafter unable to access the site via FTP, or their control panel in order to update it, or make changes. Multiple requests for assistance resulted in no responses from anyone at Stag. There have also been a couple instances of webmasters "mirroring" the SCT file on their servers in order to drive traffic to their sites. None of these unethical webmasters ever contacted me for permission to use my intellectual property, nor will they respond to messages I send them.

In August of 2002, I lost my job at the Gateway Store. While I wouldn’t have believed it at the time, they did me a huge favor! I now have a great job, and unlike with the retail job at Gateway, I haven’t had to work a Saturday since! As the Gateway Country Store system continued to slide downward I became even more thankful for the change. In April of 2004, Gateway closed down all the remaining Country Stores, including the Overland Park store. An era had ended.

In light of this – and the fact I’ll shovel pig poo before I take another retail position – there probably will not be any new photos added to this collection. Thanks to everyone who has visited and commented on Stupid Computer Tricks!

Enjoy!

Rod Shelley