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.
The internet and me
In the early 90s I was part of a multimedia firm. Some artists I went to school with were using usenet and email, and our company had a FirstClass BBS which had an internet mail gateway, but other than that I did not really get the significance of the internet yet. I was all about the CD-ROMs.
One winter in the mid 90s a filmmaker named Thor Henrikson called me and insisted I had to see something at his place on the internet. Thor had money from the CBC to make a documentary he was doing on this thing called the World Wide Web. (Thor’s film
Webheads, featuring Don McKellar, showed on CBC in June 1996.)
When I got to Thor’s apartment he had not shaved in days, takeout containers were everywhere and he may have been in his underwear. The nexus of all the chaos was his computer. He was using the budget of his film for a direct connection to the Internet so that he could do research.
“Kev, you gotta see this.” Thor opened a window on his Mac and typed something into a box. In a few seconds some text appeared in the window, and then some graphics started to show up.
Thor moved his cursor to underlined text and clicked. The window went blank for a little while, and then there were some new words and a picture of a coffee pot.
I don’t remember where that coffee pot was at, but I was impressed when I understood it was a near live image updated automatically, available at this web address, and that we got there from clicking text on another web page. It all looked really simple and I started to care less about CD-ROMs.
Some online evidence of me:
In 2005 I completed the first draft of
When Multimedia Was Black and White which was briefly
discussed here on MetaFilter.
Via the web archive
here is a web page I made in 1996 that looked good at the time and still looks good.
I published
photo essays & anecdotes at an eponymous .com from 2001 to 2005, when my web site was afflicted with
flickr interruptus.
Kevinsteele.com is very slowly evolving into a blog with a photo archive while I post
new photos on Flickr.
I like cats. I take pictures of cats. You may have seen one of my cat photos in
Schrödinger’s LOLcat or
I’z serious – it wuz this big!
