My Internet Life...

What has gotten into me this month? Three postings? That has to be a new record or something. I'm not even sure why I keep this up. I suppose it is to keep connected with some fabulous people I've encountered over the past ten years or so...

Maybe it was longer than that....

My internet experience started back before there were these things called browsers. You had to type Unix commands to access sites. But I wasn't interested in the growth of the internet I was only on to play a MUD! I sat in front of my monochrome monitor on my little 286 computer making my way through the zones and player killings of (insert tense music, 'dun, dun, dun'), The Final Challenge. In this little universe I came up with my two most favorite MMRPG and Internet handles, (Triston and Venthor). I was the first evil character to ever max out on a multi-classed character (level 50 or 30-30-30). While I wasn't one of the first people to play that mud, I certainly was in the very early stages of the mud. I haven't played much, but a few years ago I did have the opportunity to go to a few get-togethers down in Chicago. Those were a blast.

Since I'm pretty much a geek, this whole internet thing fascinated me. I heard you could use pictures and stuff. So I left the command line world and found myself inside a browser. I don't remember which browser I lost my internet virginity on, but I found myself wanting more and more. Hell I even found my job at Trek through the internet.

I never got pulled into the sub-culture of the web. I tried to stay inside of windows and its programming as I hopped from job to job. I always dabbed in web programming, downloaded a few napster songs back in the day and found lots of pictures of nakkid women. Ah the age of information at my fingertips was exciting.

Then EverQuest came along and I got sucked back into playing an on-line game. This game enthralled me the first time I picked up the box at the store. It was everything I dreamed about when I was 15 and playing dungeon and dragons (old school style...paper, pencils and imagination). The graphics wowed me (no pun intended). I ate the game up and it consumed me worse than any other game in history. And I met even more amazing people in that game. I also met the one woman who got away. But I would never trade that time I spent with her and I owe that game to being able to meet Mic. And there were other people who I became closely connected too. Spending hours waiting for things to appear or to fight through dungeons has a way of bring people together. But people move on and lives change in time. Some people were smart and gave the game up knowing that their lives were consumed by a virtual world. I hung on. Not to really play the game, but to stay close to those I cared about.

After I got divorced I think the game became less important to me. I found myself happy with who I was and I changed some things about what I was. My career became more important than trying to level a cartoon. I tried to start relationships. I failed, but I tried. I made a few mistakes because I wasn't patient, but I learned from it all. (I still wasn't getting enough sex. Maybe it was all the computer games I was(am) playing. Nah.....)

And of course there was World of Warcraft. While I enjoyed the game, it never became what TFC or EQ did. I spent my fair share of time there. Met some nice people, but I never allowed anyone there to get too close. I tried to keep it what it was...a game.

Now I'm working for a company and I'm the Lead Programmer in designing an Intranet Web Application. It is pretty cutting edge stuff. While the project managers have no clue on how to manage a project like this, it is exciting to see what we are trying to make a web site (browsers, data base and such do...).

Now I've become the geeky hands on nerd of the web. I know more than I ever thought on putting together a web application. Oh, I dabbled and 'knew' enough to put together some light-weight web pages together, but this is different. I hope I can convince the people I work for that I know what I'm doing and they should listen, but when they write the paychecks you let them direct the traffic to a certain point.

However something in the future scares me. Conan...it looks freakin' cool. But who has time to play that? By the way, I've finally mastered a few 'expert' songs in Rock Band...

I have a feeling when I'm in my retirement home. I'll be the only one there still playing video games. I'm such a ner...geek.

cya laterz
moi