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What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

This is just my name. My mother and father gave it to me. :)

I started on the net in November 1991 when I was a student at the Colorado School of Mines. I was among a small group of people there who become quickly addicted to a chat system called the Haven. It was written by Chris Eleveld (who was a student at Purdue at the time), and used a single server to host about 20-30 users at a time. It grew into a large and somewhat pathological subculture from there...

I remember seeing an early message about this thing called the World Wide Web, and thinking to myself "Geez, what a dorky name. Hypertext? What the hell? That doesn't sound useful to me."

I also remember back when the signal-to-noise ratio on Usenet was so low that you could read every message (in certain groups) and not have it be a waste of your time. I remember when the first people to spam Usenet, Canter & Siegel, were widely reviled and attacked for their sacrilege.

I have wistful memories of the time when sending an unwanted email message was utterly unthinkable.

When I started on the Internet, it was just a place for freaks, and I liked it that way, being somewhat of a freak myself.

I have seen much of the goodness of the culture and ethos of my early net days gradually obliterated as more and more non-freaks came aboard. This has been a great loss, to me, even as many new and good things have resulted that were never possible when the internet was just a fringe thing.