An admission, of sorts.

As a nerdy little sixth grader mostly known for voracious reading, I first heard about the World Wide Web. And ever since, I’ve been obsessed by the Internet. Back when Earthlink and AOL and Compuserve CDs littered our (snail) mailboxes, I badgered my parents into signing up for as many free trials as possible. I mastered the language spoken by our 14.4k modem and crossed my fingers each time I attempted log-in, praying that I had dialed in when there were ample open slots to connect. I discovered Juno and rejoiced at the free ad-supported email which didn’t require an Internet connection, only a modem. And in the off-months when it wasn’t feasible to access a free month of the Internet in all its visual glory, I dialed into my local library and took advantage of the text-only Lynx browser. To the chagrin of my parents, not only did I release their credit card number to multiple Internet providers of dubious repute, I also tied up our only phone line.

It was around 1995 or 1996 when I discovered Geocities, using the ubiquitous “Hello, World” as my foray into web design. From Geocities, my first CMS was Greymatter, Noah Grey’s wonderful gift to the Internet world. I also dabbled with scribble.nu, Movable Type (before it was a paid service), Expression Engine, Blogger, Livejournal and Xanga. Along the way, I co-founded a small web development shop to pay for summer travel through Europe in college, used the “library” at Barnes and Noble as my personal PHP learning course, and hacked multiple CSS themes to uncover the inner workings of the WordPress CMS. Although one might think that an experience of this magnitude would lead to a blog greater than a decade old, only the Wayback Machine holds the fragmented remains of my past Internet lives. It somehow seems fitting that on my birthday, 13 or 14 years later, my blog would see rebirth.

I still love the Internet.

And it’s never too late.