Get any sleep? Me neither.

In an earlier post (How early could it be? This is only the third one!), I said that I had been on the Internet for a long time. Not long after I married Roxanne, in 1996, her brother-in-law, Glen Ray, sort of threw the gauntlet in my face. I know he didn't mean it that way, but he is a very tech-savvy person (notice I didn't use the word Geek), and he asked me if I had started a personal web-page yet. I'd been surfing the net for quite a while, but a web-page of my own? It sounded way out of my league. But the seed had been planted, and I started doing a little research.

I was on AOL at the time, and I discovered that I could put a web-page up there for free, anytime I wanted to. A little more poking around, and I found a fairly new company emerging over the horizon called CoffeeCup Software (Shameless Plugs R Us), who had developed a very useful thing called an HTML Editor, to make writing and publishing a web-site easy for guys like me. Well, I love a challenge, as long as it's not too hard or inconvenient, and there's nothing good on TV, so I did a little playing, and pretty soon I had a site of my own on AOL. And the rest is history. Goodnight.

Sorry. Over the following years, I moved from SOL (It was a typo, but I like it; it stays) to other Internet Service Providers, and at each place, I was able to put up a personal web-site. As my skills and my arsenal of software grew, the site became sort of a trophy shelf. I could say, "Have you seen my picture of the Loch Ness Monster? Check out my web-site!" And that would be an excuse to give people my web address. (That pic, and others from Scotland, will eventually end up here.)

Well, this past summer, I had a slight misunderstanding with my latest ISP, and I ended up losing my Internet connection altogether. In a panic, I turned to the only place I could think of, NetZero (No, this is NOT a recommendation; quite the contrary!) I went that way because I knew I could get free disk from just about anywhere, the grocery store, Radio Shack, etc., and be back online in a very short while. Since I do nearly all my banking online, this was essential. So I hooked up with NZ, knowing all along that this was only a temporary thing. The really bad thing was that I had to go through my lists and change my e-mail with everybody in the world, still knowing that it was temporary, and would have to be done all over again pretty soon.

There is a simple solution to the e-mail problem, and as I'm into shameless plugs (see above parentheses), that solution is GMail. (I'm not too dogmatic; if you prefer Yahoo or MSN's HotMail, those will work too.) The point is, over the years I had bounced from one ISP to another, each time having to change my address; my last ISP, 'Intergate.com", should have been more or less permanent, but it went the way of all the others, and I had to do something drastic. I opened an account with Google's GMail, sent notices around the world yet again, and have been using that address exclusively ever since.

Happy ending do that story: a couple of months ago, I was able to get high-speed Internet, so I've disconnected from NZ, and because of GMail, the process has been fairly painless. The only downside is that when I lost Intergate, I lost my personal web-site. Sometime this year I hope to be able to get a really for true commercial site of my own, but in the meantime, using free space provided by "Weebly.com" to post a few items, like this Blog/Therapy thing (There's a link at the bottom of this page, if you're in the market for a personal web-page.). Web-page creation here at Weebly is more or less automated, which is a bit of a trial for an old HTML pro like myself, but for a lot of people who're not experienced with the process, this is a great way to produce your own web-page without learning HTML from the ground up first.

While I'm here, I'm putting some more links at the bottom. CoffeeCut has a fine collection of affordable web-site creation software; if you're into graphics, you need to check out Xara-3D. This company has developed the most amazing software that turns simple text or 2-D images into 3-D shapes that can be manipulated in real time...well, you just have to see it to believe it. Actually, I used Xara-3D to generate the front-cover text of my new book. Use the "CreateSpace" link below to see it (and as soon as the book goes live, next week or the week after, I hope, you can use the same link to order a copy for yourself; you'll be glad you did.).

There. I've gone on until I've bored myself. So Doctor, do you think I can be cured? What?? Only after years and years of expensive therapy??

Oh well. Back to the blog.

Cheers, and God bless you all, if anybody's out here,
Dave
aka St Enoch
aka Cyrano

The Promised Links:
http://www.coffeecup.com/
http://www.xara.com/us/
https://www.createspace.com/3418197



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