I think my internet life started out in the Frogpond, an early beta chunk of the pre-internet Microsoft Network. A bit later, I was part of the first wave of weblogs, way back in (waves cane) early 2000. You can dredge some of that out of the Wayback Machine if you care to go hunting. There were fewer than 500 weblogs in the world at that time.

After that, I ran a reasonably successful (i.e., it made money on advertising) weblog focused on Microsoft-centric software development. Then there was a more popular but less paid weblog on open source development, when I gave up on Microsoft. I tried to put that one in the memory hole when I retired, but some well-meaning person grabbed the domain registration and restored the content, to my mild annoyance.

Somewhere in there I was one of the first Twitter users, back when it was literally possible to read the entire firehose of all tweets, and one of the first Twitter developers, back when they had a free and open API. I ran a land business in Second Life for a bit too. So yeah, I’ve bounced around the internet.

I finally retired from software development, disgusted with the way the industry was going, and walked away from all social media to spend time in the real world.

So why am I back now?

Just because. Retirement gives me time to pursue some of my interests, mainly hiking and photography. So now I share some hiking photography, in the hopes that someone will like it. If not, well, electrons are cheap.