Blathering religious scholars like to mention that Christ didn’t begin to preach until he was about 30 years old. Apparently, up until that point he was nothing more than the slacker son of the man who hath the plan. After a hard day of carpentry Jesus loved nothing more than to do some hangin’ out; some chillin’. Now and then he probably got inspired and built a spice rack to show off to his pals, but he had nothing to prove really. He was a dude.

But Jesus was also wise man. He instinctually knew and took to heart a great many things that most people needed educational training or specific experiences to discover. And the things he had actually studied he knew backwards and forwards. So on one momentous day he looked up from his frankincense and saw that the people of the world were being led astray. Jesus clearly saw that the ratio of harmless idiots to proselytizing asswipes had gotten way out of hand.

Long story short, he managed to get some some friends and fellow inhabitants of the town of Capernaum to follow him up onto the nearby mountain, sat them down, and proceeded to keep it real. Eventually, his cheese slid off his cracker and he went around pushing over tables at the local currency exchange. As we all know, this little hissy was the beginning of his tragic end. But it says a lot that he got himself killed in the course of dispensing righteousness; there isn’t a blogger alive with that kind of conviction. But the point here is that when he realized that the status quo wasn’t gonna improve unless people like him began to use their voices to speak their slant on the truth, that’s when he began a public life to try and set things right.

Aside from not being thirty years old yet, which is to my credit actually, the plight Mr. Christ up until his little mountaintop gathering is roughly parallel to my own. Like him, I have been doing my thing, lurkin’ the scene, and not really throwing down my two cents even when the situation has called for it. Had I been here all along, maybe I could’ve made a diffence… thrown my stick in the wheel spokes of the assholes perpetuating the rampant bogosity that has finally called me to action.

Since I can’t really claim that my old man is the one true god (hah! he doesn’t even have a beard anymore), I’m gonna throw out some lesser claims and you can take them for what their worth. The point of doing this is to illustrate that as far as the web goes, I have been here almost since the beginning. I missed out on NCSA Mosaic, but that’s about it. If you can’t say the same, you’re a sorry n00b whom I will never fully respect unless you drop me some coin or flash me your boobs.

1. The first game console I ever touched was an Atari. The first I ever loved was the Nintendo, and yes, I had a subscribtion to Nintendo Power.
2. As far as PCs, I started out on a C64. Despite having thousands of disks to choose from, I spent hours gleaning my first taste of coding by typing in the source for shitty games from magazines and books.
3. In 1987, as a 2nd grader, I wrote a graphical presentation in LOGO (a lisp-like language) that took 2nd place in a K-5 contest in one of the largest counties east of the Mississippi River.
4. I was BBSing at the end (the height really) of the scene when we had RIP screens; even set up my own RoboBBS for kicks. For those of you who weren’t there, this was the web of content that the web you know replaced.
5. I was once a master in the dark arts of squeezing under the 640k limit by miles in order to play games.
6. I was surfing the web in 1995 with Netscape 1.2 running over AOL 2.0 under Windows 3.1. Ugh, AOL… once logged onto AOL at 300 baud with my C64 when it was still called QuantumLink.
7. I was on the web when the only thing worth doing was checking Yahoo! for new sites to visit; and every day there were more new sites than the day before. This was long before a URL had ever appeared in a magazine ad.
8. I started my first (and until now my last) “personal” website, the MP3 Programmer’s Lounge, early in 1998; there was no google yet, but we had AltaVista, Lycos, and WebCrawler and we were happy.
9. I took part in launching one of the first MP3 search sites. It featured a custom FTP spider at a time when anyone who actually knew what an MP3 was could also tell you on the spot that the “3″ stands for Layer 3 of the MPEG-2 specification.

So I may be n00b to many; but if you have to “google” to discover the purpose of typing LOAD”*”,8,1 then you’re a n00b by a completely different magnitude.

In case you haven’t noticed, now I’m up on my own mountain doing my part to drown the noise in signal. In other words, my bullshit is now your entertainment. I have need for 12 worthy disciples in case you’re interested.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 8th, 2005 at 11:20 pm and is filed under my blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.