27. Master’s degree program at Deakin University Geelong Australia

1996
17 Lynn Place Hackham, South Australia

•  
• January Sacha playing basketball/ me doing Masters/ still with Kris/ walking to gym
• letter from Fringe people regarding “1,000 paintings in the park”

“In 1996 Adelaide will again host the Adelaide Fringe Festival. The festival is now a major festival in its own right yet remains an open access Festival. In 1994 more than 300 organisations representing nearly 3,500 individual artists presented over 1,000 performances and exhibitions to an audience of over 525,000. The Adelaide Fringe Festival will run from (go to below sites after February 1, 2000, for specifics) AdelaideFestival2000.html.

(“Mr Terrell Neuage has expressed his intention to be a part of this vibrant festival with his exhibition/event 1,000 Paintings in the Park. As a participant in the 1994 Fringe Festival, he has a proven track record and we believe his exhibition would be a valuable asset to the Fringe outdoor program. We wholeheartedly support the efforts of Mr Neuage in securing a suitable and unique venue and we look forward to hosting him in 1996 in Adelaide. )
What I wrote somewhere and printed and distributed to radio stations to read:

Terrell Neuage will once again display picture poetry in Adelaide South Australia during that time. At the 1996 Adelaide Fringe Festival 2000 picture-poems were hung from tree-to-tree throughout Rymill Park, along with other textually enhanced creations; such as graffitized plaster of Paris clothing. At the 1994 Adelaide Fringe Festival Terrell Neuage displayed picture-poetry and other textual-free-versed designs.

• March 10 – Rymill Park 6 AM to 7 PM
• 9th Sacha to Ballarat to play basketball
• July 2nd Sacha to Christie Beach HS
• 12th printed cardettes
• 22nd 600 hits at Bourbon site June first – 5.2 hits per day
• October 26th Deakin Graduation

Master’s degree program at Deakin

In January 1996, I got the letter that put me into a new league or at least another league from anyone that dropped out of school and never returned. I received my letter saying I was admitted to the Master’s degree program at Deakin. I was so excited and how I ever got in did not matter. It was happening and that was a great moment in my life. There was even the thought that I would become a better writing machine – change my sentence structure so as to be logical and easy to read and sensible – the whole world of writing was there for me to explore and to exploit. And just like I was probably lucky to get into an honours program I was lucky to get to the next level. I got second class honours and a B in that – the lowest rung of the bottom of the ladder but it did not matter to me. The fact was that I was on my way to getting a higher degree. I was told it would be the end of the line; to go any further I would have to have a first class honours degree. I thought the idea was funny that I would ever want to go any further. What, get a PhD? No thanks – a Masters was enough for me. I also could not do my master’s by research which apparently is some snotty thing to do – I had to do it by course work which was like having training wheels in the academic world. But who would know? The degree is the same whether it is done by research or by course work – the only difference was that to try to get into a doctoral program a student had to have a master’s by research, like if I cared. It was a two-year program, and I shuddered at the idea of two more years at university. That would mean eight years straight at university and then if I add the three years of TAFE I would be at school for eleven years. Those seemed nuts. I would also be fifty years old by the time I finished my schooling and that was old for a student in anyone’s world.

My proposal was accepted to do several coursework projects, and my thesis was to be on the “The Influence of the World Wide Web on Literature”. My supervisor was Dr M, Research and Graduate Studies Convener. I never met her but she passed me at the end of the course two-years later. Now that I had a reasonably good excuse, I began spending even more time at Flinders University making more WebPages. My kids would go off to school in the morning and I would go to Flinders and spend the next six hours at the computer. Most of my sites were on Angelfire but after a year, with many devoted self-indulgence hours spent on spreading the good word about me on the World Wide Web, and hundreds of WebPages; Angelfire’s system crashed, wiping out all my work. When the Angelfire domain began again I started to add more pages. My other favourite site at the time was Geocities.  I eventually favoured them because they had less advertisement, i.e. (pop ups). Of course, I wrote a letter to Angelfire – and of course (why would there be) there was no response.

Without making excuses for being obsessive and compulsive I am providing some stats for those who use all these wonderful free servers.
Having hundreds of sites on various servers (I have sites on 145 servers at last count, and dozens of pages on each server) I have kept records on two specific sites and have found some very interesting, though obvious facts.

I put counters on more than one hundred Angelfire and Geocities sites and have all the counters linked on one site so with a click I can see how many hits I have to each site.
My findings:  Since Angelfire has put on their banner aids my average hits have gone from 83.65 hits per day to 48.47 hits per day (I am just putting up my writings so I am not in the same league as folks with thousands of hits per day).

My sites are a series of poems linked ‘next poem’ - obviously having to wait for the banner aid to load then having to delete them to read the page is off putting for readers.  I have more than one hundred pages linked and of course the numbers go down as the number grows.  For example, lots of hits to the first couple of pages dwindling to a few hits a day for the hundredth page.  Who has the time to read a hundred poems?  That makes sense, but at the same time there has been almost a 50% drop in visits from go to whoa. 

In contrast, Geocities, which has adopted a smaller ad in the corner, has not had any effect in number of hits.
Conclusion, banner ads will turn people away from your sites.

I am partial to Angelfire, as it was my first site five years ago.  Of course, when Angelfire crashed and ate everyone’s site three-years ago that was quite a mess - but since these new ads have gone up I have stopped using their service. 

Obviously free sites need to make a living, but if you want a professional site pay the few pennies that commercial sites now cost and use the free servers to learn how to make sites and not as a representative of who you are.

From an obsessive compulsive webber.
Terrell Neuage

http://se.unisa.edu.au/z.html of course that URL from my university days is no longer functional but I have a copy over at http://neuage.org/z.html    
It was easier to make pages with their templates, and I gradually learnt how to make my own pages from scratch using all the hypertext code that one does not need to know anymore to make a webpage. I spent many weeks learning to do things like the making of a simple table and adding the information in each line.

<table border="1">
<tr>
<td>strike outs</td>
<td>walks</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>12</td>
<td>3</td>
</tr>
</table>
How it looks in a browser:

This was before tables could be created in Microsoft Word and saved as html and long before I had any software that could make Webpages. Angelfire and Geocities had basic web making templates but I learnt all the codes to make tables, colours, blinking and scrolling texts and images and I still find it useful even with sophisticated software such as Macromedia’s Dreamweaver (now Adobe Dreamweaver Creative Cloud).

My Masters was a coursework degree but I still had to write a thesis that I did online. I do not recall all I did for the course work – there was something on poetry and I did a very complex textual poem with hypertexual exchanges that gave the reader authorship. The final hypertext poem became lost somewhere in the sudden wiping out of Webpages. It was on my original Geocities site: http://www.Geocities.com/BourbonStreet/1218/  then for some unexplained reason that site vanished from domain-heaven.

I had made hundreds of pages on the bourbon street site then I received an e-mail from Geocities saying that because I had another Geocities site they had deleted my bourbon street site. There was some line about how I had gone against the “spirit” of a free webserver. I had used different names and how Geocities could know that there was more than one site used by me I have no idea. Geocities would have had thousands of people make WebPages and to tell me that because I had used their free site more than once was quite strange. Another free site server at the time – infoserve – I did the same thing as I had done on other free servers – I made many sites. I do not mean many pages – but many sites and I had hundreds of pages and links on each server site. This server I really abused the concept of having only one site and a few pages within the site. I received an e-mail after several months saying all my sites would be deleted. I had put in hundreds of hours and had a couple of hundred sites with all sorts of names and places so that anyone using any one of a thousand or so keywords would-should-could find my site on the search engines. The person who wrote me, Steve Case, later became the head of AOL and quite wealthy but at some point, in his career he wrote an e-mail to little old insignificant me.

I had made several sites on any free server I could find and at one point I had more than one-hundred free servers. Over the years the free servers became mostly porn sites or product selling sites. It is clear that is what these sites were set up for to begin with. By offering free websites and many people taking advantage of them it drove the name of the domain name to a high rating in-search engines. When people would like up one of my sites they would get directed to a site I had nothing to do with. It took years for this to become apparent. Several companies offer free sites that are still running such as Geocities (not anymore, 2015), Angelfire and Fortunecity (not anymore, 2015). All free sites have popup banners except for one that I came across that never had any popups and  was free all the way and my pages are still on it years after I signed up,

http://www.indiko.com and no one has come close to having a service like they give and for free. There are not even any ads when I go to their site to upload my pages, and they have never sent advertising emails and they give 30 megabytes of space with many extras. I have no idea why they do it or what is in it for them but for years I have been putting WebPages on their server with my main-page being http://neuage.indiko.com. It is still there in August 2015.

I had made use of my bourbon street site for more than two years. Several months after having been given the boot from Geocities I went back to try and reclaim my site but someone had gotten the site and now, seven years later there is still nothing on the website. However, when I put in “neuage” into Google I get this site within the first ten or so listings. My name does not appear anywhere on the page or even in the header codes which are not shown by the browser.

Hi, I'm jazzywolf.

I signed up on 08/01/97 07:03:32, but have not moved in yet.

The description of my page is:
Here to have a good time
Love to meet exciting people
This place is great
Whomever jazzywolf is he or she had taken my original site and left me as an Internet orphan lost in the bytes of the World Wide Web.134F

28. LITwebERATURE: Master’s thesis: Influence of the World Wide Web on literature

Terrell Neuage, (dual citizen USA/Australia) is a South Australian/New York poet, writer, and digital artist known for his evocative poetry and extensive research on conversational analysis in on-line communciations (including communication in the AI era; from sharing information to making sense of it). His best-selling autobiographies;Leaving America (Before the After) & Leaving Australia (after) – exploring life as a hippie, brother in a California Cult (Holy Order of MANS) as Brother Terrell Adsit, Astrolger (40-years) to non-believer, and adventures in Australia, single parent, tofu manufacturer/street artist, China, the USA & fifty+ other ountries. From high school drop out, Shenendehowa Central School, Clifton Park, New York at age 16, back to school at age 44 (BA & Masters from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) to PhD from the University of South Australia at age 58 to knocking on your door at age 77.