Christmas Day is already here and we’re going to enjoy the day relaxing, eating yummy food with family. Hopefully you are/will be doing the same with your family, friends and loved ones! Before we head off to the festivities, we thought we’d quickly throw together a Christmas design for the occasion. What do you think? Like? Don’t like?

Merry Christmas, everyone!
- Julia and Tania. : o) : o).

It’s been many years since we’ve had a notable snowfall in the city: six years if memory has it right. Snow covered the city, but not nearly as much as today’s. Where we are, 10cm to 20cm fell. Other parts of the city, it was reported to be 30cm (so that would be a feet of snow for people used to the imperial measurement system).

    When the weather forecasters said there is snow heading our way, we had our doubts. We thought it’d probably miss us, and the prediction is really for the hill areas—or we’ll have sleety showers like most of the time but not snow. Well, we got proven wrong and they got it right. They said snow will fall, that it will fall here; That it did. They even got the days right and the time, too!

    So now we’ve got snow and it continues to fall heavily. The city isn’t as well equipped for snow as other cities around the world that are more experienced with significant amounts of snow. Where they probably continue business as normal, we here have closures of roads, businesses, schools and the airport. The authorities have advised people to stay off the roads and only travel if absolutely necessary due to dangerous driving conditions. Only people with 4-wheel-drives should venture out in the deep snow we heard the reports say. So what do we do with this sudden confinement? We head out to the backyard and build a snowman!

    What do you think of our snowman? We always like to build and sculpt the snowman completely of snow. That means no carrot for the nose, no buttons for the eyes and mouth, no twigs for the arms, and no wool scarf and hat. Just snow. : o) : o). We decided to make a couple of bunny rabbits, too. They don’t belong in the Winter season; but they’re white, the snow is white and they’re cute, so we had to include them!

Last night, whilst surfing the Internet, we decided to randomly type in the name of the very first site we built, Staj’s Star Trek Voyager Site. We knew this site didn’t exist anymore because it was hosted on Yahoo! GeoCities and this free webhosting service no longer exists (it was shut down two years ago after being not very profitable for its owners). Still, we wanted to see what results would come up. Fifteen pages of search results showed up on the Google search. We scrolled down the results and clicked into a few sites that had linked to our site, then followed the links to our own fansite.

    “Sorry, the GeoCities web site you were trying to reach is no longer available” is the message we get.

    Looking at this, it was kind of sad. Our fansite, which we devoted so much of our time on during our younger days, no longer exists. Over three hundred pages, fifteen or so sections with many more sub-sections and sub-sub-sections, disappeared within a day. We did back it up onto our hard-drive and we could always relaunch it on this domain of ours (we might someday), but it just wasn’t the same. We had hoped that our Star Trek Voyager fansite would live on the Internet forever on its original webhost.

    We went through some more pages of search results to find oocities.org. Apparently this site saves and archives pages that were “unique scientific sources or are of great public interest”, “historically interesting”, or “representing the 90′s website culture and style”. Browsing through the paths, we find out that our fansite was one of them saved. We’re not sure which of the three categories we fit into, but we were happy to see that someone went to the trouble of saving some of these GeoCities sites and relaunched them on another webhost in the same structure as GeoCities. We excitedly click on the link to our fansite and see the sky-blue background featuring an overlay of the Voyager crew and Starship Voyager load. They really saved it, we thought. We then click each of the sections to find them missing. They had only managed to grab the first page. What a disappointment.

    It was not until we scanned through the last few pages of the search results on Google, we came across reocities.com, a place that saved our entire site as well as hundreds of thousands of other GeoCities accounts! All the Geocities Neighbourhoods were saved. Millions of pages archived. Our fansite and all its sections, pages, pictures, sounds, were all saved. Our fansite lives on! What’s more, during this search, we found out that our site is part of this Fan History Wiki. We’re not sure what this is, but it’s nice to be included.

    So for those of you who love Star Trek Voyager and are looking for Staj’s Star Trek Voyager Site, go visit our site at http://www.reocities.com/Area51/Starship/9943! It still exists. For those of you who built a site on GeoCities and wish to visit your own site, visit reocities.com. They saved a lot of accounts back in 2009. Chances are, yours is there. If it isn’t, you could see if they’re still accepting files for inclusions. You could also try visiting oocities.org: ours may not have been saved in full, but there were a lot of accounts that were.