Because I know you are all curious, here's a brief history of my efforts in the webpage world. So if you think this design is bad, just wait!

My first effort, in January 1999, was spurred by my friends Jeremy and Eric and some others who no longer have a web presence (at least not that I know of.) It was called "The Gates of Hell" as a play on a joke a high school friend of mine used to make on my name. My favorite joke these days is, "Like Bill, but not as rich." Luckly for the web community as a whole, there are no existing archives of this attempt. It's just as well. It was as black and red as the name implies. And to be truthful, I don't remember much else about it.

The second was not much better design-wise, but I did have the good sense to change the color scheme to a neutral tan & green. It was called "The Gates Cafe" and was terribly themed, with everything relating to a resteraunt. I tried to get Eric to host it on his newly aquired www.prolefeed.com but I don't blame him at all for declining. Yuck.

In November 1999, I changed formats drastically, introducing "The Not-So Daily Press". The Not So has so far lasted the longest, surviving until February 2001. It wasn't actually replaced for some time after that, but that's when I stopped updateing. I had been growing frusterated with the newspaper format for at least six months, and had become increasingly annoyed with my inability to talk about anyone I knew, as they all read it.

To counter that annoyance, in January 2001 I started a seperate page, "I am not am I" which was an experiment in minimalist design and masked journaling. I wrote under an assumed name and made up names for all of my cohorts. It was fun and complicated at the same time, and I think is some of my best web writing to date. However the contents are not linked here for the same reasons that they were secret in the first place. If you would like to read it, please email me and tell me why.

I stopped updateing that in March 2001, because I wasn't feeling as stifled as I had been, and shortly thereafter did a complete overhaul on "The Not So", turning it into a fishy predecessor to this format. It was the short lived "Ghoti Spells Fish" which was never updated with any frequency, as it existed mostly while I was in New Jersey with spotty internet acess. It was retired forcibly when the school server figured out that I was no longer a student in September.

When I returned home in October I returned James' computer and no longer had access to any of these archives, and so "A Cardboard Box" was written entirely from scratch. Probably a good thing. Welcome home.