BLAME WHEATON; IT'S HIS FAULT
A year ago today, I was browsing the forums at Fark.com, probably waiting for somebody to respond to a long-since forgotten pithy comment I had made. Bored to tears, I strayed over to wilwheaton.net to see what the ST:TNG veteran had to say. Nothing memorable, it seems, because it didn't take long for me to start perusing his links page. And that led me here.
In just under seven hours, I will celebrate my one-year noding anniversary. When I first got to E2, I was a bit overwhelmed. So I read through the FAQs, and decided to start by noding what I knew. And, contrary to the experience of many, my first writeup didn't get nuked. And neither did my second. I may have become a bit overconfident following my initial successes, however, as my third died a brutal (but well-deserved) death. Regardless of the fate of my Ralph Wiggum quotes, I'm still here.
I'm still here, unlike Joey Michaels, who activated his E2 account the same day as I registered mine. I didn't know Joey then, but we wound up competing against each other in survivorBLOG3, and now are co-conspirators at vutant.com. In the coming weeks, I will try to bring him back into the fold. (edit: He's since logged in to his account, meaning he finally remembered his password. Halfway there!)
My anniversary has been marred somewhat by recent struggles with software. A Microsoft "Critical Update" left Internet Explorer functioning erratically, and will not allow me to open Outlook Express at all. Tinkering with the applications has thusfar failed to fix the problem, so I've resorted to the next best thing: replacing them. So here I am using a new browser (Opera) and a new e-mail program (Microsoft Outlook) for the first time since late 1999, when I finally gave up on Netscape.