Facilities and Operations

NewsGuy is about...well...living the dream. Over the past 35 years, your continued business has allowed us to expand from the original 50 sq. ft facility to the palatial 200 sq. ft we now occupy.

The original structure was a little cramped for the 10 of us, so seasonally, and on a rotational basis, 6 of us worked outside. Of course running across a field to Earl's I-90 76 station to use the restrooms was inconvenient, but we were a happy bunch. Today, we have room for almost all of us, and Earl lets us park the office in the back corner of his driveway, right next to the restrooms. Life is good.

Most people don't remember that NewsGuy News Service began its journey as a commercial electronic greeting card site called "Internet Sweetheart", on Valentine's Day 1994. The phones were manned, or womaned, full staff on weekends, and not a single person called. Of course the service went on to become quite a hit - I'm sure you're are familiar with a little  show called "Friends" ?

The NewsGuy Systems

In our "spare no expense" approach to the overall NewsGuy system and network design, our technical staff has creatively assembled some of the most advanced concepts in Internet communications into what we could only label as a super freakin' high speed information delivery system.

Observing where the Intel Inside CPU approach was taking the rest of the industry, NewsGuy quietly and persistently bought up all surplus Z80 - Z8000 designation processors, a warehouse full of Radio Shack Model 4's and COCO's, and the world supply of 8k Apple II memory chips. These were assembled into a massive parallel processing network, linked to 1,024 single sided 160k 5.25' floppy disk drives, then routed through a whole lotta' Hayes 300 baud modems, then on though the original Prodigy bulleting board service IBM/Sears backbone and, finally funneled into an ISDN link at a BellTel switchbox in Chester, Ohio. Oh yeah, then we put up a web site where we coined the original phrase, "Check out our web site at Http//newsguy.com".

The NewsGuy Staff

If there were any simple phrase to describe Cindy, it would have to be....gosh...probably... "down to earth". Cindy is a natural leader, unfettered by thoughts of what might constitute a reasonable assignment or workload. She is always eager to listen to our stories relating, to our (as she frequently put it) trivial and banal issues and/or existences.

During 1995, NewsGuy issued a commemorative coin as part of our NewsGuy collectors series. On one side was a portrait of Cindy's NewsGuy Coronation and, on the other, the Latin  phrase, "As ificus icood carious les", which pretty much brings into focus the relationship between our illustrious leader and our minion like roles.

Actually, Cindy is the person who has a high level of tolerance to our nonsense, and provides the positive presence in the organization. This was best illustrated by her first move as fearless leader, when she removed Joe from all customer service responsibilities.

It wasn't so much the Stanford stuff that impressed everyone at NewsGuy, as much as Kachun Lee's post grad degree from Weehawken School of Automatic Transmission Repair, and his early uncanny ability to locate the dumpster in the valley that had the best system components. Kachun, with his partner Teresa Wu were able to tape, wire and bale a bunch of cast off hardware and software into the first news service.

Today, maybe a little different than the system description listed previously on this page, they've put together the service on a large collection of high speed UNIX servers, tied through multiple redundant high speed internal networks, all hung on the Internet through two hellacious OC-48 connections. Nah...I don't know what all that means either, but I know we've had no system down time for as long as I can remember, including news, hosted sights, Internet access accounts, news for ISPs, archives........

Kachun defines himself not as a computer weenie, but as a mathematician, and addresses Teresa only as "Yes Dear". As yet a further commitment to the overall service operation, this past year they had his and hers "Ronco System-Down Alert! Alert!" pager implants. In their spare time they also made some modest contributions to the service in the form of our friend the Spam Hippo, Direct Read News, Web mail, Web based chat, souped up INN, and all of the automation and administrative software on the service.

Mike is our Commercial Accounts Manager, and writes the "SportsGuy" column. He is best known for coming up with the "Sign up to NewsGuy, win a big pig" contest, a contest that not only led to no increased NewsGuy circulation, but actually earned Mike the Lifetime Achievement - Bronze Pig on Wheels Award.

Mike is the staff's only normal human at NewsGuy and, consequently, insists on trying to help us understand the game of golf. Our feeling remains that if you really want to hit something at several hundred yards, a rifle is more efficient and exciting. We've all seen Michael dance at NewsGuy social functions, if he were a movie it would be " Pinocchio meets the Werewolf. They marry and have a son, whose only dream is to be a River Dancer. It doesn't work out". As Michael would say at a Jennifer Holliday performance, "Golly, she's quite a toe tapper". Mike presides over the fastest growing segment of NewsGuy - which probably explains the smile.

We're not sure what happened to Rich. He came in as a marketing management grad, spent a lot of time at the tech lunch table, worked in tech support, and started to drift away.....We found Pearl programming books at his desk, "100 exciting scripts you can write", "The Best of Pearl"  and "You and Your Pearl". Finally a Mac was found connected to his network node. Rich, like most techies, awaits the successful return of Devo, or the grandchildren of ELO

Today Rich is like the rest of the techno guys at NewsGuy, we have no idea what he does, however, we are careful not to insult him because all such personnel have the power to make our screens go blank. Cindy gave him the propeller hat which, we understand from reliable sources, he wears to bed. Rich also writes the TechGuy column. Besides routine technical support duties, Rich keeps us going with the application software download section and conducts ongoing tests with all sorts of software to make sure we can be responsive to customers using "Byte Me - the News Reader"  and seeing less than optimal performance.

Bob, Bob, Bob...Where to begin ? For starters, Bob's name is Joe. Since there are two guys on the service named Joe, and I'm the real one, Joe II elected to rename himself something distinctive, different, memorable - he came up with "Bob". As the creative genius behind our marketing efforts, Bob has had mixed results. As an example, most people wouldn't know NewsGuy was originally intended to serve as a mail order veterinary service, a concept well ahead of its time. 

Bob thinks of himself as a Renaissance man, based solely on his expansive collection of "Doug, the submersible fish tank diving dog" paraphernalia, an office wall covered with finger paintings, and the fact he recently tricked a very nice woman into marrying him. Unlike Mike, Joe actually can dance and has a dream of creating Locker's 2000.

Over time he has filled the service with imaginary turkeys, feisty bandits, pilgrims, dinosaur tracks,  presidential kidnappings, graphics, music and images, plus confusing and misleading contests that offer virtually no reward. Bob also writes Bob-O-Vision, produces the NewsGuy Gallery and gets us on TV shows.

I don't actually work at NewsGuy, but I do have a desk in the facility. For a long time people thought my primary job was to frighten new users and irritate service customers. Totally untrue, I never try to frighten new users. I hang around because they let me write about firearms based sports and moderate, conservative politics. I am absolutely as grumpy as I seem, which is why everyone pushes Queen Cindy ahead of them, when they want to deliver any sort of critical message from the masses.

Jose Zeep has been the all too human blend of good and evil. He could just as easily be found harassing moderators of news groups and participating in the the cold blooded kidnapping of a turkey, as well as sitting in a cantina with his friends Leon and Pilgrim Boy.

Rumors have placed him as far away as Pennsylvania, where he thought he might practice law. Shame of profession and parental embarrassment caused him to return to a life style with greater integrity - an outlaw. He's been away from the service for a while, but we think we'll be seeing more of him soon.

We use to think Jose Zeep was politically incorrect, even though we knew he represented what we all really wanted to be in life. Then we saw the Taco Bell campaign and Jose Zeep, overnight, rose to become a dignified pillar of the community

Now that the NBA strike has killed the season and Thanksgiving is well behind us, we may be seeing more of Leon. After feigning his own kidnapping, starring is his own version of Adventure, and finally drifting on to make a name for himself on an endless stream of adult binary web sites as "Big Tom Leon..Oh yeah!", he is back in contract negotiations with the staff at NewsGuy.  He may be back just in time for the holidays.

The first in a long line of NewsGuy Collectibles, illustrating that if you serialize anything, people will seek to posses it, as was the case with Pilgrim Boy who clearly became an object of frenzied desire.

Following on the heels of our Thanksgiving Limited Edition Mr. Potato Heads were: Joe's WebTV console, Dinosaur footprints and doodoo in glass, paired goldfish frozen in time in Lucite and many. many commemorative plaques and T-Shirts.