It began fairly much at the beginning, when Netscape was the only browser, and webpages featured only organized text, with a picture or two thrown in, somewhat similar to news articles. If you were fancy, you had a different color for the background and text. I learned HTML in under an hour, by myself, by looking at the source code of people's pages. I then taught it to my friends, and we had a merry time creating our own pages of text with a picture or two thrown in.

Soon, you were able to add a picture as the background, instead of a solid color. Wow. We were so very impressed, and a few of us found pictures to use as backgrounds for our own pages. How fascinating. You could soon search for other peoples websites on search engines, like Lycos, and something called 'Yahoo!', created by rogue university students or something. Wee.

Well, since I was on the computer all the time, and had grown up with computers in the house, and since my chemistry degree was panning out, I thought "Hey, why don't I try for computer science?" Why, indeed. So I arrived at the office for the meeting with the Dean of Computer Science, and waited. I stayed outside the door. I thought they had seen me there, but apparently I was invisible at that time. (I know it seems odd that someone like me could possibly not be noticed, but trust me, I can be invisible to people at times.)

So, the Dean came out of a meeting with some other student, and asked his secretary who was next. She pulled out my file for him too look at. He exclaimed, "Not another one of those!" and sighed. He muttered some things under his breath, and went back to his office. At this point, I decided to 'arrive for the meeting', and came in.

I sat down in the Dean's office, and looked at him. He immediately assumed his I'm-Better-Than-You intimidation act, but I already knew I wasn't going to be allowed in, so I glared back at him hautily. He began the interview with the usual meaningless things people say when they want you to play Beg-Me-To-Get-In, and I answered curtly. He realized I wasn't in the mood to play around, and concluded with "Well, we'll need to look at your marks, but we're so full that we can't possibly admit you before the winter semester. Why don't you try again then?" Yeah, right. Oh please sir, may I have some more? I stood up and breezed airily out the door, with a vague "Whatever..." and never went back. I was in the computer lab almost all the time, and he gave me a look every time he walked by, after that, but all I gave him was either a malicious smirk, or a nose-in-the-air 'hmmph' and ignored him, depending on how I felt.

So I never got a chance to learn coding in a class. All my coding knowledge of HTML, and later, of Java and Javascript, were self-taught. I also never had a decent computer of my own, nor an Internet connection, so all of my earlier coding was done for years on a rickety old laptop, and later on a rickety old 386, both times in the DOS 'edit' program, between 1996 and 1998, and I never actually got to see what they looked like, or if they were done right, until mid-1998. Then, my friend Kincaid made a website space for me (this Geocities space, actually), and uploaded my files with his computer. When I needed to upload more files, I had to hope he was awake and not busy, so I could beg the use of his computer again. I also got to use his scanner and Photoshop to put a few of my drawings up. But I kept forgetting what my webpage address was, and while I had been away from the Internet, they had introduces frames, tables forms, all sorts of things. I tried to keep up with it, but now people weren't coding themselves anymore. People were using programs which could generate the code for them. I tried to use those programs, but I had to know what the code was like, so I ended up mostly re-editing the code with text-editors anyway. I wanted to know what the code was doing, and I was disgusted by the extra coding such programs added. "Hi, I wwas generated with FrontPage and I'm so happyyyyy! I'm version blah blah and was created on such-and-such a date. This is an HTML page, wheeeeee!!! Did I ever tell you about the time..." etc. etc. The excess code was, well, excessive, an I had to take it out each time I edited a page. So I went back to the text editors.

Then, the Industrial Design Hell began, and I had no free time. My webpage was essentially abandoned for almost 2 years, and I was sure it had been deleted (because I could never remember the address, and couldn't find the page in any search engines). Meanwhile, Yahoo! had not only stopped being a search engine, but had become a huge company, and that Geocities had been absorbed into it's ever-growing self, so I didn't even know where my page was... But, in early 2000, my roommate decided it was time for an Internet connection. Through Kincaid's help, I found my webpage again, and made the transition from Geocities to Yahoo! Geocities. The page had the dust lightly shaken from it, and I borrowed the use of Kincaid's scanner again, to add significantly to the image collection. I also took down a few of the writings. But, the coding more or less stayed the same. I polished it a tiny bit, but it was still essentially the same coding.

This year (2001), I decided that I had had enough of my frames version, because most of the people visiting the page couldn't even see it, due to direct linking to my anime critique section (which is now my nemesis), and I had never gotten around to a frameless version. Now was the time to have links to the rest of the major portions of my page on every part of my page-- a frameless version, of a sort. So, the Version 3 of my page was born, and slowly grew to encompass what I hope is the entirity of my webpage, because I certainly am tired of going through all the HTML files I have and converting them. I seem to have lost or confused most of the visiters (the ones who linked in through the anime critique section) through my coding changed, but I'm more happy with this version than the other two, by far. I dread the day I have to change it again.

-- April 24/01