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SATURDAY, APRIL 19, 2008

Ten years ago tonight, I launched my regularly updated web page on AOL, building upon the basic framework of a placeholder page I had put together a year earlier so I could begin learning HTML. This photo of myself in Hawaii, taken by my oldest friend Sam Phillips, appeared there for a long time. During that first year, my mom was the only person who regularly read my page, so I kept a dark blue border running down the left side of it since that was her favorite color. At some point, I helped design her own page, but have lost track of what happened to it.

At the turn of this century, I registered my name as a website address, and last year pointed it to this personal web log which I began in 2006. I still have yet to move over the individual pages from the original website that were devoted to detailed lists of movies seen in theaters each calendar year and also the trip reports of my worldly travels... All in good time. I should at least put links here to the old website pages, which still exist.

I've kept personal journals of my daily life since 1979, to help me keep organized and remember things of interest. I'm not going to impress anybody with the things I do, and am not going to have many unique or important thoughts, and don't aim to. But I like to think that keeping my good memories and experiences organized on a public site that will live forever will help any future descendants get to know me in some way. So if Ben and his children and grandchildren want to know anything about his crazy dad, they can just keep on reading!