-- history alert --
you will not find anything remotely deep or humorous about the following...
all you will get is a drop of a glimpse of how this site came into existence...
but if you finish... you get a prize!!!
-- end alert --
I did not have access to the internet until I got into college... and until I got my own desktop my sophomore year, I did not have 24/7 access...
You see, the internet wasn't quite so wide stream whilst I was in highschool - growing up, I remember witnessing slight hints of Prodigy and AOL... but I had no idea what I was seeing - pictures and text popping up, seemingly out of no where, didn't impact me at that point of my life.
I got my first e-mail account in the fall of 1996... and believe you me, that was the coolest thing in my world at that time. I was e-mailing everyone I knew that had an e-mail address, sending out jokes, forwards, stupid questions... I would check my e-mail every five minutes (or whenever I could get to the computer lab...)
that lasted about a month.
then I discovered IRC... for the rest of the semester, my life as a person ended and I began my life as a screen name. You could see that my grade point for my first term in college was inversely proportional to the level of my typing skills... so yeah... I got really good at pounding keyboards and creating those silly little ASCII symbols...
During my online chatting tenure, I discovered HTML... and with the help of a friend, I quickly learned to create web pages and copy code from sites I found really cool... I created crude pictures with MS Paint and borrowed my cousins Snappy card to post pictures...
This was my foray into the online journal world - the year was 1997...
Throughout this year I my skill at creating graphics and designing pages increased dramtically. By the middle of my sophomore year, I had the makings of a great website...
then several things happened that blew my interest in maintaining a website: I moved in with Luis, we figured out how to bypass the schools firewalls to allow us to have networked gaming, and I turned 19...
Luis is one of my closest and best friends and probably the only guy I with whom I could possibly live for as long as I have without having any problems whatsoever (we were ideal roommates), and, along with Kris, we began a two year stint of playing ping pong, roller hockey, and pool, and went coffee house hopping and, quite frequently, class skipping...
it is most likely my fault Luis failed several of his classes over those years...
but mostly for the next reason...
online gaming was reaching new peaks, and we were riding in the wave on its crest... command and conquer, starcraft, and roguespear single-handedly wiped out months of our lives...
then, once we turned 19... it was off to Canada... we were suddenly legal, and we did not have classes on Fridays...
nuff said.
So I fell off the web page wagon... Geocities, Asian Avenue, my school website... all sat in their incompleted glory for the next 4 years...
my last entry dating 2000, when I updated my resume on one of the pages...
but as fate should have it... my circle of friends began blogging (I chalked it up to what I was doing previously, except this seemed to have much more steam behind it) due to the ease of their creations and the simplicity of the whole thing...
I was busy being a bum and then eventually, busy looking for a job...
2001 - Everyone was blogging, and I was getting used to working.
I didn't have time (i.e. I didn't make time) to get into the online lives of my friends who were still in college or just getting out of college, or whatever. I couldn't hang. I had to sleep before midnight (and that used to be the time I started doing homework.)
Then, towards the end of 2001 my fiancee (who was just my girlfriend at the time) jumped on - she had a lot of free time at work then...
2002 - So, I decided "Hey, I'm gonna make her a web page that she can use instead of a third party site" and I bought the domain name for "babiegoose.com" and got a host and began...
except I didn't get too far...
I didn't (and still don't) have the knowledge to create my own scripts and engine and whatever I needed to have a fully funtional, self-sustaining blog.
So I asked for help.. which (more or less) didn't come.
Then, I sat on it for a year...
2003 - and a half...
then, after getting a crap load of free time at work, I began to read peoples blogs... and the more I read, the more I wanted to read... and I just kept on reading and reading and reading...
then I figured... what the hell... I have the site and the host... figure it out now...
after a few pointed questions, I was lead to Movabletype...
and here we are... 100 entries later, and 90 entries more than I thought I type...
and now, here you are, reading this thoroughly, unfunny, quasi interesting story of how I got here...
I kind of wish that I never stopped keeping journal entries, or at least had saved off my entries from college... it would be cool to look back on the things that I have done with greater accuracy and detail as well as seeing how I evolved the many aspects of my being...
so this is for the record... and if you've made it this far, the knowledge you have gleaned from reading this is a far greater prize than any prize I could possibly give you.
So, I leave you to ponder the following immortal words of Socrates:
"I drank what?"
