Why are you reading this?
I wish I knew. Drop me a line and let me know. Some reasons probably include:

  • You have no life.
  • You are a relative of mine.
  • You are a friend of mine looking for ammo to poke fun at me.
  • You find me irresistably interesting.

Probably one of the first three.

Home Pages are Weird...

Hardly a serious title for an essay, so I'll just say a few paragraphs. The concept of a "Home Page" is a fundamentally new concept for most people. There really aren't that many examples of writings one publishes simply for the advertisement of one's self. There are exceptions to this, of course; politicians spend a great deal of money to promote themselves. Your average student or person-on-the-street, however, never really did much of this unless they had similar political aspirations.

Then, the Web came along. The Web was created by computer geeks who, to be honest, are weird to begin with (I'll admit to this as much as the next guy.) The Web was a great spiffy new way of sharing information; now all we needed was information to share. Academic papers and references showed up early, but there wasn't much glue to connect them together, and so the home page was born. People put up home pages to tell about themselves, their projects, their research; billboards providing information to whomever wandered past.

Part of this, I suppose, inherits from personal ads, where the author is trying to sell himself or herself to others; but that's not really the motivation behind most home pages. The Home Page exists as an attempt to carve out a place in this world to claim as the author's own: "I did this! This is mine!", while placing it in a location where others can see it. It's simply another expression of the fundamental drive behind much of human existance: to change the world, to make a mark, and not to pass unnoticed into the silence of the night.

A home page costs not much more than the author's time, but provides solace that in this ever-growing world of more than 5 billion people, I was here. And I had something to say about it.

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