"Lock the doors and close the blinds -- we're going for a ride..."

I suppose if I'm going to author a personal blog without being an angst-ridden teenage girl, I better explain to everyone what the hell I'm doing:

When I went to the University of Maryland a decade ago, the web was in its infancy. I recall having to become an expert in Unix to be able to apply for an internet account which would allow me to send and receive email. I even remember having to use the default "mail" program on the old VAXes (VAXen?) before i was able to discover and move up to mush, then pine.

Anyhow -- skip ahead to 1993 -- I was using something called "Gopher" -- think of this as a text-based, more rigidly structured version of the web. Eventually one of my friends saw me using it and told me about this program called "Mosaic" which would give me the good old stuff on Gopher -- but with graphics. This was, indeed, the World Wide Web. I even remember that (aside from the U of MD website that defaulted as the home page) the first website I visited was mtv.com, run by then VJ Adam Curry. The site was run kind of like a blog -- in that there really wasn't all that much content out there that people could use -- no sound clips, no video clips, no flash animations, etc.

(Eventually Adam Curry left MTV and there was a huge battle regarding the domain name -- Adam said that MTV originally had no interest in it when he asked if he could start an internet project for MTV -- and they seemed to jump on the bandwagon once they realized how to profit from it.)

Anyhow -- I started my own website on my U of MD WAM account -- "The Shiny Page." I treated it like a blog of sorts for the same reasons. I even pssted my "Shiny Notes" columns from The Diamondback for others outside of College Park (with the rare luxuery of net access) to read.

That page moved along with me. To Princeton. Then to Chapel Hill. Then back to College Park. I never really got it up and running at its current home, kyra-mike.net. Mostly it's because posting raw HTML code and uploading it was getting tiresome -- and often my thoughts would come at the most inopportune times.

That brings me here. I've liked the idea of blogging, and Lizza's blog seemed to push me over to the writing side of it.

But wait -- I'm a 31 year old married guy with a kid!

Yeah. This makes things a little weird. I'm afraid I probably won't have any postings like "OMG - Bryan actually said HI!!!!!!!! to me yesterday!" Or "DMX RULEZ 4EVER!" (Wow I'm out of touch...) But I still want to exercise the brain now and then, and share a bit of it with anyone else who wants to eavesdrop.

Simply put -- I now have the opportunity to be an annoying dickweed to many, many more people than I usually run into. :-)

The one condition I've given myself is that _if_ I keep this blog going, I promised myself I'd keep the other blog going. It's the one in which I've been writing letters to my son, now 14 months old. Hopefully he'll read it once he becomes old enough. I won't tell you where that one is -- good luck searching though...