I don’t know exactly what it is, but ever since my first intrepid steps into the world of the internet, I’ve always wanted to be a webmaster. And no, it wasn’t just the fancy title that had the word master in it that intrigued me. I was back in the early 1990’s when I first ventured online, when I was working in the IT department of our local university. We had access to the internet initially using tools like Gopher. Eventually, the first graphical browser I ever used called Mosaic really opened my eyes. The fact that it actually integrated graphics within all the textual information really blew me away. I knew, I had to be more involved with this stuff.

I was one of the first in the department to learn HTML, and a few years after leaving would take my first steps to creating my own website. I always had a fascination with games, so while I worked full time as a PeopleSoft consultant travelling around North America, I spent time creating my first video game, and the website that would promote it. I remember coming up with my first domain name during a team meeting in San Francisco. While everyone else was chattering away endlessly about the problems with our project implementation, I was scribbling down possible domain names.

Having decided on a name, I then needed to buy it, and have it hosted somewhere. One of the big gaming portals I frequented at the time I met someone who was willing to host game developers websites for free. He would even register the domain name for me. That worked great for a while, but eventually he got bored or tired of all the problems and stopped offering the service. So, I thought how tough could it be. I had an old PC at home, so I installed Linux on it, and got my own web-server up and running from home. I used a service called dyn-dns to deal with my constantly changing IP number and I was off to the races.

Eventually, one website grew into several, and I need a more reliable and affordable web hosting solution. I continue to use several paid hosting companies, and am always on the look out for more.   Since buying that first website back in November of 2000, this has been an incredible fun and fruitful experience. I continue to be fascinated by the internet, and all the wonderful services it offers. I can hardly wait to see what the next ten years will bring.

I think, everyone remembers that first time they spend a significant amount of time away from home.  I’m not talking about a weekend sleepover at a friends, or even a week at summer camp.  I’m talking about months at a time, thousands of miles away from home.  Mine didn’t occur till rather later in life.  I was 20 and turned 21 during my extended adventure.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I hung around close to home my entire life.  I still hadn’t gone to college yet, so that was soon to come.  As a youngster, I did travel quite a bit through drum corp, but it was an activity that my parents were always involved in, so it never really felt like I was away from home.  Being away from home means more than just leaving the house you physically live in.  What it really means is, leaving your family and friends behind.

That happened for me for the first time in January of 1983.  It was to be my last year of drum corp, and I was travelling to Boston, Massachetutes to join the 27th Lancers.  This was a twelve hour drive from where I lived in Canada, so probably about 700 miles.  So, maybe thousands was an exagerration.  But, I would be there for an incredibly long time.  From January till the end of August.  That’s usually the end of a drum corp season.

Trying to decide which story to tell is a little bit tough here.  Not that there aren’t man, beleive me, there were lots.  When I first moved there, I lived in the suburb of Revere with two other guys and a girl.  We live in a little three story walk-up above some slightly crazy people.  They lady below used to complain constantly about our music and that we were making wierd noises to try and drive her crazy.  Personally I think she was already there.  One day, her son attacked one of my room mates as we made our way down the stairs to go to the laundrymat.  The son even then called the ppolice to report himself.  Craziness was heridatary in that family for sure.

Then there was the time, I was with eight or ten buddies spending a day at Revere beach.  It was jut before summer, and we were getting into the usual young person trouble.  Drinking and smoking on the beach were all fun and games, till a couple of bodies floated up on the beach.  Creepy huh?  One of them lived and one of them died.  Apparently they had been out fishing the night before and fell overboard.  Police and ambulances showed up of course.  Kinda of crazy when your already breaking a number of laws on a public beach.  Not as crazy as the foam coming out of the one guys mouth, which I saw from the crowd. Yeeech!

That’s just a couple of the stories from that eight month adventure.  But the rest will have to wait for another post.

I was hooked on computers at a very young age.  Well maybe not as young as the computer genius today get hooked at, but for someone of my generation it was pretty young.  It was a Radio Shack computer.  To be more precise, it was a TRS-80 computer.  Otherwise known affectionately as a trash 80.  Usually by friend that owned one of the few other competing brands at the time, like something from Texas Instruments.  A company which to this day still manages to make a profit manufacturing calculators.

Our TRS-80 came with a keyboard, a monitor, and a cassette tape drive.  At first, I don’t think we had the cassette tape drive, but added it on later when we realized how annoying it was to only type programs into the computer, and then have to do it again every time we turned it off and back on again.  It’s good to be able to save your work.

I learned a few things from that computer that continue to haunt me to this day.  The first thing I learned, was how to write a computer program.  The TRS-80 came with it’s own BASIC instructional booklet, and allowed you to write programs in the BASIC programming language.  This was cool, and I was desperately hooked.

I also learned how to play games on a computer.  Yes, even in the mid seventies you could play computer games.  But what was really cool, was that you could also write your own computer games.  Sure, they were incredibly simple and graphics were totally non existent, but they were games none the less.  I think the first game I wrote was something where you had to guess a number between 1 and 10 and the computer would give you clues.  It used a random number generator to pick the number.

I also learned to play the game backgammon on the TRS80.  It came with one, I didn’t have to write it, and it was pretty cool.  I had never played backgammon before, and learned it exclusively from the computer.  Although for years afterwords, when I tried playing it on a real board in the real world, I never knew how to setup the board.

Still my passion for computer games and making computer games was ignited.  One that continues to this day.  Unfortunately, I was never able to make a career out of it, but I do own several gaming related websites.  With any luck, I’ll make enough off of those to start a gaming company and hire myself as Chief Game Designer Extraordinaire.

There are a number of firsts we experience in life, and stay in our memory for our entire lives.  Many of those events are deeply personal and private.  This is not one of those stories.  Many of those momentous firsts we experience are also meant to be shared, and take place on a public stage.  Sometimes with dozens or hundreds or even thousands watching.  This particular event I’m thinking of was definitely witnessed by less than a dozen, and perhaps even no one.  I can’t be too sure, as I was pretty involved in trying to make certain things work for me the way I thought they should.

For the longest time, I got the strange notion, that I would like to sail.  I’m pretty sure it had something to do with listening to much too much Jimmy Buffett music, but that’s another story.  Being the bookworm that I am, I thought the first thing I should do was to read as much information I could about the ancient art of sailing.  I made a trip to the library and got all kinds of sailing books and checked them out.  I poured over them for hours.  Upon completion, I was pretty sure I understood the basics about how to sail a boat.  One of the things I discovered, was that this was one of those things you could only go so far with before you needed to get your hands dirty.

Well, that opportunity would present itself soon enough.  Upon pouring through the local classified paper, I read an ad for a little 13 foot Snark sailboat for sale.  And it was only about $200.  I made a phone call, and drove out to the gentleman’s house.  As it turned out, he had won the boat in a draw from a local pet store.  PetSmart I believe.  The boat was constructed of high density Styrofoam, and come with one sail.  I purchased a life jacket and a canoe oar (in case the wind dies), and some tie downs from the local Canadian Tire store.  With the car upside down on the roof of my Saturn, I drove out to a small man made lake in town called Fanshawe Lake.

I launched the boat, paddled a little off shore, and spent the next few hours trying to figure out why the boat refused to respond to my every command.  Just as I was about to head home, I realized that my rudder had two settings.  The first setting had it lifted out of the water, and the second setting had it in the water.  Needless to say, I had bee trying to sail around for hours with my rudder out of the water.  Anyone who has tried to steer a rudderless boat, can understand how difficult that can be.  I lowered the rudder into the water, and all of a sudden everything worked.  The experienced of being powered and moving around this small lake completely under wind power and my own skill was remarkable, astonishing, spectacular and life changing.  10 years later I still get a kick out of it.