I looked at the calendar this morning to see when the fifth anniversary of me meeting my wife was (we met in April 2004), and it looks like that day's only five months away. Coincidentally, the other day was the first time I noticed a gray hair poking out of the front of my hairline, as opposed to where I usually occasionally find them in my sideburns. I suppose these are some of the trade-offs of being 31.
I should say that I'm lucky enough to be with the same wonderful person for five years, but cosmetically, you may not be the same brown-haired guy who could easily put back a six-pack.
This milestone made me realize that I've also been blogging for nearly five years. I've been writing on the Internet, in one form or another, since I began writing for the UW-Madison newspaper, The Badger Herald, back in May 1995, over 13 years ago. It was one of the first student papers on the web, and it's still totally rockin', some 13 years later. Seriously, their website looks better than most of the Bay Area newspapers, and considering it's run by 19 and 20-year-olds, it gives me a bit of hope for the future of journalism.
I began "blogging proper" with my now-defunct music blog Megalomania, which I started in Alie's 17th St. apartment in the Castro on a chilly night in April 2004, about a week or so after we met. It was on Google's fairly new Blogger platform, which I'd found just easy enough to use. I seem to recall that the title came to me because I happened to be listening to Black Sabbath's "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath".
About a year later, I joined Adam Varga's awesome Dailysonic podcast, and things just took off from there for me on the social web. It's funny; I can hardly say that I was a first-mover on many of these technologies, because I was one of the late adopters to both blogging and podcasting; people were blogging as early as '97, and podcasting as early as '01, from what I know, but I think I got into each one of those things just as they were "approaching the chasm" from the enthusiasts into the early adopter group. I guess that makes me an early adopter to two key social technologies, for better or for worse.
While my fifth anniversary of blogging is approaching, and I *do* think it's cool, I'm a little more stoked for my second-annual Thanksgiving trip to Cabo with Alie. Do let me know if you'll be in the neighborhood. We can celebrate with a margarita on the beach, listening to Black Sabbath, of course.
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