After a couple years of building websites with Macromedia and Adobe design tools in the late 90’s I moved from Fullerton, CA. to Utica, NY. and got a job at a small sheet fed press named C.L. Hudson. When I first interviewed there this ancient wrinkled drunken bald man came up to me while I was waiting by the owner’s office and asked me if I was the new stripper. Then the owner came out and told Charley to quit harassing me. I just assumed it was some weird creepy joke, but no, Charley was being serious.

At that point in time most printing presses used film to make their plates. The person that cut all the film pieces and taped them into a proper page layout was called a stripper. I was only familiar with the other kind of stripper at the time so I literally had no idea what anybody was talking about. Anyhow I convinced Arvind, the owner, that I knew all about prepress and just kept saying yes whenever he asked if I knew how to do anything. When I did graphic design for Speedy in Fullerton I learned a bit about four color process, screen angles, trapping, etc. that I was able to bluff my way in. Truthfully when I started at C.L. Hutson I had no idea what I was doing. Fortunately good ole Charley knew everything except the computer part, so he would just say ‘can you make that thing do this or that’ and I would figure it out. In return he taught me everything else about printing.

After a year of working for Arvind he got really flustered one day and fired me for insubordination. What had happened was he didn’t understand certain things I had to check files and layouts for before we started outputting film and he wanted me to skip some critical steps (I don’t recall specifically anymore but at the time I felt what he was telling me to do was going to give him some unexpected and very amateurish results). At first I tried to explain but Arvind was not getting it and eventually I told him I would do it his way. But when he left my vicinity I immediately proceeded to do the job correctly so that we wouldn’t have to strip it, make plates, and run it on press only to find it looked like shit and needed to be redone. Anyhow he caught me prepressing files I promised him I wouldn’t touch and he fired me on the spot. The C.L. Hutson images are the website and folders I designed for them.

I know. I am taking my sweet time getting to what the rat lab is, I can’t help it, I have a wandering mind. Anyhow, when Arvind fired me I was pretty upset and didn’t want to go home so I just walked out and started walking around downtown Utica. Now I had been in Utica for over a year but somehow I had never noticed a huge brick building just off the main street with a big sign on it ‘Brodock Press’. I didn’t really expect to get another job in printing but here I was in front of a print shop less than an hour after I got fired. So I went in and applied. The guy who interviewed me was the systems engineer and he liked me so much he asked me if I wanted to get my feet wet right away and see if it was a good fit. Brodock turned out to be among the top dozen boutique sheet fed print presses in the country and was very cutting edge, but that is a whole different story.

Anyhow I worked at Brodock for a couple years until we lost the majority of our clients when the world trade center collapsed. At that point I went back to web design and joined a small business association that gave me plenty of work to keep me happy. It was during this period that I first conceived the idea of the rat lab. Basically I wanted to do something like I am doing here with this website. It took me until 2004 until I actually attempted this project and though I could do nice little websites for small businesses that were good for 2002, I really still had no idea how to create a data driven website with a true backend and some sort of content management system. I did write a forum for the rat lab which was my first experience working with a modern web development language (PHP), and a database (MySQL), but the rest of the site was static pages and I had a pretty ambitious idea about what the rat lab was going to be.

One thing the rat lab had that I really liked was a section called Oddzone. That was the place where I could just let out all my weird ideas and it was OK because it was the Oddzone. Here are a couple pictures of the oddzone. I had all but forgotten about the rat lab until earlier this year when I was backing up an old hard drive I discovered a nearly complete version of it. The forum and the database were not included in this random backup that I found but other than that, most of it was there. I looked at the code. What a nightmare. I was definitely not too familiar with the do not repeat yourself coders motto at the time, or at least I did not embrace the idea. I seem to remember doing the whole site in a notepad+ type editor called Geanie, which was a Linux based editor my cousin was using. I was living with him in a house/music studio called ‘The Hive’ and he was teaching me PHP, but I was not entirely comfortable with full web development yet and relied heavily on HTML, CSS, and a little javascript.

Anyhow, I think that is plenty of back story. It didn’t take much tweaking to get the old rat lab up and running again so instead of trying to explain it I am just going to put it up here so you can see for yourself. Oh, I should warn you at the time this was made mobile first responsive design wasn’t really a thing. It’s actually crazy to think how much things have changed in 20 years. So ignore the link below if you are on a phone or prepare to be frustrated.

https://davidamlaw.com/theratlab/

So have a look around, have fun, and leave a comment below if you see something you like or have any questions. I will answer to the best of my ability. Have fun. Til next time.