Happy anniversary, baby.

On one chilly night in November 1997, I finally figured out how to use FTP software (Fetch, baby!) and Netscape Communicator's Compose module, and I designed a web page and threw it up on the web. It doesn't exist there anymore (or does it, he asks wryly).

Even though my participation in my own web presence has been hit or miss in the intervening decade, the presence itself has been unbroken.

But my web "programming" experience goes even farther back. While a senior in college, I took a single, 2-hour class on how to write HTML (I think it was March 1995). I wrote a single web page. To celebrate this milestone, I have revived the presence of my very first web page.

It's ridiculous, but it was lovingly hand-crafted. And now, for the first time ever, it's actually on the web. You can go see it here.

Happy 10th anniversary, web site. Here's to the next 10.

Two years on...

At 7:05 EDT exactly two years ago today, I began a completely new phase in my life. After having my last sugared coffee and black-bottom cupcake at Starbucks and some of my last regular soda and whatever else I used to eat before, I started down a path that I've been traveling now for two years.

I don't have a whole lot to congratulate myself for. Not that I haven't rallied to the cause - to the contrary. I simply managed to do what I should have been doing all along, and what everyone should do and is well within everyone's ability to do, which is simply take a moment and think about what they're eating or doing, and start taking the long view.

I'm now aware - painfully aware, perhaps at times even too aware - that what I do, the personal choices I make, are going to have an impact now and twenty or thirty years from now. I have lived with a very intimate knowledge, an intense realization that I am temporary, at least from this physical world's perspective (I'm still working on the rest of it). And I have good days and bad coming to an acceptance of that cold, hard fact.

I feel that in the past two years, I have a much clearer perspective on certain things, and a much lower tolerance for others. I no longer suffer fools very well (a group that has an ever-growing population in my eyes), but I am much more careful to automatically assume the worst in people. Well, at least I try much harder not to make that assumption.

Two years ago I was granted a different perspective. Not an entirely new one, but certainly one I did not have on June 27, 2005. Along with that, I acquired many new demons. I fight them on an almost daily basis these days. I feel the need to constantly and almost without abandon throw myself into whatever it is I'm doing. I feel like I've lost my ability to appreciate the moment, the Now, and perhaps am overcompensating. It's what I do in lieu of letting my mind wander to the scarier realms where I profoundly feel just how small and temporary I am.

Materially, my life is much better than it has been in a long time. Jenn and I are in as good a place as we have been since we've been dating. That's not to say we're in a great place in the grand scheme of things, but at least they're better. Two years ago today, I was a failed freelance lighting designer. Now I run the box office for one of the most energetic theater companies in the country. I have a position in my chosen profession, the one I spent all of my time in higher ed preparing for, earning recognition and respect for my ability within an industry I love. The last two years have been about rebuilding, and rebuilding correctly.

There's really no point to this except to check in, thank the scant few who check in here, and maybe relay some sense of where my scattered thoughts are at right now, in the midst of preparing for a new season, selling out the final show of the current season, and just living life in the midst of another summer in Washington (now my 8th).

Oh, and to let y'all know that I'm seeing the Transformers movie tonight. Yep, 5 days before everyone else gets a crack at it.

6000

People do still manage to find their way here. Plus, Book Nine goes global! Or something.

One April 23 at 8:37pm EDT My 6000th visitor arrived after searching Google for "live and death mask". They hail from Castilla Y Leon, Salamanca, Spain. With IE7. On Windows.

Whoever you are out there, congratulations.

ELP 015: Where I Work Now

Got myself one of them thar desk thingies. Came with the new title. I've already adorned my new space.

MMMM

That's Roman-Numeralese for 4000. As in, the number of visitors I've had since November 2004. Huzzah.

Congrats to visitors 4,000 (read her blog here), and 3,999, who is half of a superb duo from the great state of Colorado, and to whom I send nothing but the fondest of wishes.

3000

Congrats to the viewer who was here last night at about 6:50 EST. Whoever, you were, you were from Nebraska, viewing the page IE 6 in WinXP, and got here from Google. Apparently, you were looking for pictures of merry-go-rounds (one of which I have). You were my 3000th viewer. Kudos.

Two Thousand!

Someone in Maine, using IE 6.0 and linking in from Bourgeois Deviant, just became this blog's two-thousandth viewer. It happened between 4:25 and 10:45 this morning. If it was you, thanks.