Contact

I don't encourage it, but if you simply must email me, send it to 'feedback -at- dr-mercury.com'.  If you vehemently disagree with me about something, it'll get thrown away unread, so don't waste your time.  Go start your own blog, paste my offending text into the main page and have at it.  I'm not interested in debating things via email.

Bio

If you're here as a left-winger or right-winger and want to know my political persuasion, you'd better read this.

If the definition of "blogging" is a person putting up a personal online site filled with links and daily commentary, then I started "blogging" on Tuesday, Feb 6, 1990, at high noon.  That's when I flipped on the switch to my new BBS and started "blogging" daily in the message base.

Of course, the 'links' were these things known as "newspaper articles" and "other BBS phone numbers" at the time, but that's a different story. 

Since I started writing a daily online journal just a wee bit ahead of today's bloggers, I really don't consider myself in the same category.  Nor do I write daily anymore.  When you hear me referring to bloggers in the third person (the bloggers, rather then we bloggers), that's why.  In all honesty, I consider them to be late-comers to the ball.  All they did was put a cute name on something I and others had been doing for a decade.

For years I ran the aforementioned very popular BBS, located right in the heart of Silicon Valley.  While the average BBS at the time might have had 500 files online, I had 8,000.  While the average BBS might have broken the files down into ten categories ("Tools", "Music", etc), I broke it down into 224.  While the average BBS was done in plain black & white text, I employed 16-color ANSI menus, one of the first BBS's on the planet to do so.  I also wrote a 60,000 word tutorial in fluent Laypersonspeak for the computer which was widely regarded (downloaded 10,000 times from CompuServe in the first 24 hours) because it bridged the gap between us budding computer idiots and the awful technical-y manual that came with the computer.

Then the Web arrived.

Seeing the writing on the wall, I was building my first web site when the web was one month old and "blogging" by posting links and descriptions to the very few web sites out there at the time.  An early Glenn Reynolds, if you will.  I'd have links to these new things called "search engines" in one corner of the page, and colleges like Stanford that were slowly getting parts of their libraries online would be in another corner.  This was a time when the Web was just a black screen with white text, and you'd dance around the page using only the arrow keys.  A link would be a little box of 'reverse video' (black text on white) and when you got there via the arrow keys, you'd hit the Enter key and off you'd go to the next page.

I still remember the first big advancement in the development of the Web, about three months after it got rolling:

Colored links.

Rather than plain old white, the links were gold or green, program depending.

We thought we'd never seen anything so modern.
 

What's interesting is that I've had a web page "under construction" somewhere on my computer ever since.  Obviously, there were people constructing web pages before I started, but the question is, have they continually webmastered ever since those days, or did they drift off into something else?  It's possible that I've been continually webmastering longer than anyone on the planet.  An interesting, if mostly meaningless, accolade.

I also have a couple of web 'firsts' to my credit.

Then I became a video god.

Jeez, how these things start, huh?  I ask one little question in a tiny video group on Usenet, and, the next thing I know, two years later I'm one of the leading experts in the field of computer video and running what was generally considered to be the premiere video how-to site on the Web.  Crazy.

Then I-

Pardon me?  What's that?  You say that you want to be a video god, too?  Well, that's great!  I could sure use the help!  First, memorize all 650 pages in the 'Video' area over to your left, then let it be known in alt.binaries.multimedia.utilities that you're now a video god — and just wait for the adulation and accolades to come pouring in!

And thanks again for the help!

This started a few years before DVD burners hit the scene.  There was a format called SVCD that would allow you to burn high-quality DVD movies or home camcorder movies of the kids to CD discs and play them on a CD-ROM or most home DVD players, and that's what the site helped people do.

Then DVD burners arrived so the site pioneered the way into this exciting new area.  This monster of a site (650 pages, 1,000 pictures in the guides) is now the 'Video Help' link over to your left.

In the few years since, I've kept up a site with various articles on it, but mainly for use as links.  Most of it was never open to the public.  To be honest, because of all the video clips and pictures I have, I was deathly afraid I'd use up my monthly bandwidth allotment in a week — which I would have with the old web host.  When I discovered the new wave of web hosting companies a while back, and realized bandwidth wasn't going to be an issue, I decided to put the whole thing up, and that's what you see.  The Site Info page has more details about the site, itself.

Enjoy!