In 1998 I was going to Benjamin Franklin Middle School. I had always been interested in computers so I took the "Advanced Technology" class there. The teacher and I became good friends. Among many other things the teacher did for me, she took me to a class on HTML and Adobe Pagemill, and she paid. So boom, I knew yet another thing about computers. If you read my WTF site, you'll find that I also love Star Trek. So there was the perfect idea for my first webpage. I started working on it in January of '98. I alowed for six months of work and learning to happen before I finally put it up in June of '98. Up until this point I only had a 14.4Bps modem so my site had hardly any content on account of it took about an hour to download 1 MB of info. So there was no way I had any pics or anything. My website still fit on a 1.44 MB Floppy Disk. Of course my brother then gets a new computer before me. I deserve the new computer first, I'm the computer nerd, but anyway he had to keep his computer in my room for the longest time because he didn't have electircal outlets or a phone line in his room (the garage) at the time. His computer came with a shiny new 56kbps modem. I could download a MB in less than three minutes now. From there I uploaded my site. It was about a MB so it only took a few minutes. The process of finding a web host took me hours. At first I was going to geocities until I realized that XOOM had the same space and FTP access. I knew FTP already, because I had done some work on the Jefferson Elementary School District's WAN that required FTPing my new configuration files to a remote server. Besides I thought (and still think) that GeoCities file manager is fake as hell and very inefficient, any real webmaster prefers FTPing their files to a remote server. So there I was with XOOM. Again being able to to browse the web at a reasonable speed I found out about things like javascript and CGI. So my webpage shot from 1 MB to 20 MBs without much delay. I was working on my website for hours and hours everyday. Constantly trying to improve my design.

      What happened was that in my Sophomore year at WHS I got into what I'd like to call "real networking". Until then I had only been learning how to network MAC computers. This is hella fake. You plug them into each other and all of a sudden they can share files. It's pretty boring. But I learned "real networking" at WHS. Networking PCs is a lot harder than MACs. I learned all about the cables and different NOSs and everything. I got really distracted from web designing. As far as I know there's only a few things that divide computers. Networking, programing, then everything else. I've had the "everything else" down for a long time, and I hit the programing for a couple years, HTML is a programing language. But now I've been concentrating on networking. I am back into programing a little but. Obviously I'm working on my page again, but I've also been doing PERL for some of my friends and I've taken up C and QBasic for fun. I'll probably get into the Visual languages soon. Probably time to stop networking at that time.

      So, originally my startrek page was called Admiral Shaw's StarTrek Page. That's some boring crap. After I was really able to search the net I quickly figured how amature that was. So I changed it to Starbase45 which used to be the base I was posted at in a Startrek RPG that I used to play a lot. After that the only other big project I worked on is my WTF site which is a personal site about me. In the future I'm hoping to add a site about games and a huge site about computers to the Starbase 45 network. This will take a lot of work on my part. Anyway, at the time of Admiral Shaw's Startrek Page, I got complaints from people who said that they couldn't navigate my page. I had been messing around a lot with javascripts and sounds and frames and other crap and I ended up with a page that only the lastest version of MSIE could display. I didn't even know. Previously I had used Netscape at Ben Franklin and other places with MACs. I found Netscape just as limited and boring as MACs are. So I only used MSIE at home. I decided that I'd download Netscape. Yah, so I use it about once a year to view my webpage. I guess I should start testing it on MSN and AOL browsers also. From this testing and complaining I came out with four versions of the "main interface" page for the startrek page. These were Oberth, Constitution, Excelcer and Galaxy "class" versions. For you non-trekkers these are types of starships from weak to strong. So one version was text only for super weak browsers. This version will be kept as an option on my updated page. The next version was for old versions of MSIE and Netcrap that didn't support frames or tables. Another for latest version of Netcrap or MSIE that had frames and tables and a script or two. Finally the Galaxy Class version only worked on the latest MSIE browser. It had frames and scripts and sounds and all kinds of crap. But this all was tedious as hell to update. So my newer site will be only a couple of choices. My main content for the most part has been pictures, but I plan to have a lot more info in there on my latest release.

      My WTF site started on January 28, 2000. This was partially from pressure from a close friend to put out a different kind of site. All my sites were technical or startrek sites until then. She had her own personl site that was/is VERY good. So I created: What The Fuck? A site about Michael Shaw!? I didn't expect this site to generate much of anything, but it became more popular than my flagship site, startrek. Many of my friends treat me like a god so many people came to my site to worship me. Others just came to see what the latest shiznit was. All good, I was happy. As of March 2001, I was still generating 10 hits per month. The hit count went down after I stopped updating. I stopped updating when my friend (mentioned at beginning or paragraph) and I got into a huge fight and I lost heart. When the page first came up I got about 5-10 per day. But I'm sure it will go up again.

      So for the future, I will make this site a free and abundant sorce of information. Most of this will be information that I have and want to share. I'm looking forward to the future of this site: my greatest freetime hobby.