An early promotional card for this site
In September 2005, this site celebrates its ten-year anniversary. The Internet has changed the world in so many ways since 1995 - from email to eBay to al Qaeda videos of people cutting off heads.

It's hard to imagine in 1995, when I said I wanted to put my stories on what was just coming to be known as the World Wide Web, my then-friend Erik Gavriluk advised me against including the cartoons. "The web is a text medium," he explained, showing me a postage-stamp-sized version of what my one of my cartoons would look like online.

Erik also promised to help me construct the site, a promise forgotten when he moved to Seattle and got a job with Microsoft. So I did it myself, drawing on the complete lack of technical knowledge inherent in a Bachelors of Arts degree. This was in the days before sitebuilding programs, so I got a HTML handbook as thick as a brick and did it myself, by hand. I remember pounding the floor of my apartment in frustration at one point. But I still code by hand, which I think helps give the site its unique look.

The site developed a following around the world - I met a lot of people online, and a few in person. It never made me a famous writer, in part because when I finally did decide to sell out to the print medium, I was trying to sell Five George Washingtons, a complete turkey of a novel about the first days of the Internet industry.

But I do hope I gave people some pleasure via the stories and cartoons, and I hope that I encouraged other writers, particularly through the reading series Web Writers In the Flesh.

One of the ideas behind that series was that online writing would at some point find its own style, the thing it could provide that no other medium could, and it has - the blog. Several friends have suggested that I consider blogging, but as a single parent working full time, I just can't do it at this point in my life. I do, however, plan to contribute to my friend Vanessa Rubria Fabiano's pan-European blog from time to time.

I am, however, starting a new project to celebrate the 10th anniversary of this site: Half-life: The Bumbling Story of Me. I've been taking notes for an autobiography for years- but, God willing, am only halfway through my time on Earth. People have always responded to my more personal stories, such as My Life in Denmark, and in a worst-case scenario, it'll be something for my daughter Georgia to read after I go to that big NetCafe in the sky.

I'll update Half-life with new episodes on a random basis.