MetaFilter

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.

"ericost" is a ridiculous contraction of "Eric Costello" that I came up with when getting my first (and last) AOL account in '95. It was the only reasonable variation on my name that was still available, but now I find it depressing that I don't much like a name I gave to myself. Still, I have been using it ever since, and I fear I can't switch to a new one without extreme identity confusion, both on my part and others; plus, all the good names are taken now.

I was actually only getting AOL because I needed email capabilities. I had a 14.4 dial up provided by a friend in the IT staff of the ad agency I was temping at, but I didn't get an email account with a pirated, shared dial-up.

I instantly fell in love with the web, and since I was really just starting to get involved with computers (I had somehow evaded it all through college, as only an English Lit major can), the web and all of its learn-as-you-go ethic, where everybody was figuring out HTML at the same time, and learning new techniques was as easy as viewing source, well that was all very appealing to me, and I quickly decided that I wanted to do it for a living, and started Schwa with some friends in the summer of 1996. I thought I was all the shit because I figured out how to do forced table layouts with the single-pixel-gif trick before I read it on Siegel's site.

If there was one thing that convinced me that the web was for real, it was finding some Real Audio files of the FBI negotiations with David Koresh. It seemed to me then that the internet could be a way for the man or woman on the street to have access to primary news sources, instead of having to rely on the filtered news bite version of the news brought to you by the major news outlets. This promise has not really been fulfilled, but we're getting there.

But it was all the satisfaction that came from learning new technology that I was hungry for, and I took part in very few online communities until rather recently. I didn't even have a personal "home page" until 2000, when I started glish.com. It was in 1999 that I came across girlhacker and jkottke's sites and I felt I had found a community of peers, people who did what I did and had a human voice on the web. Then I found MetaFilter, started glish, and now I spend way too much time surfing and posting links and reading MeFi and other weblogs. I even took the time to write this silly blurb on a Saturday morning when I should be cleaning out the basement to get our house ready for sale...