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 I guess it's about time I updated this thing. So, for better or for worse, here we go, once more unto the breach my friends...

Who? Me? Just a harmless, humble Electrical and Computer Engineering Student at Western who also has a mind (crazy? naïve enough?) to try and pull off an English degree as well; if the timetabling doesn't send him to hell in the process.

A waste of disk space might well describe my presence on this web server, but then again, I've got a few megabytes with which to play around, so I might as well make the best of it.

So, for now (until I manage to put something more up), please do browse around my collection of web-pages. There's some music, there's some photography, and you might also find a couple of words thrown together in a haphazard manner for dramatic effect here and there. Enjoy!

A note about the pop-ups: This personal website, in its various incarnations over the last five years or so, started out when Angelfire (before it was bought out by WhoWhere, and before WhoWhere was bought out by Lycos) was a good alternative to Geocities (before it was bought out by Yahoo), simply because member sites were completely devoid of the annoying popups made the latter free service the butt-end of so many jokes in those early, pioneering days of the Web. But then again, Geocities had the unprecedented advantage of offering 1 whole megabyte of disk space, whereas Angelfire users were limited to 200 kilobytes, but I digress. In any case, the popups became an "optional" part of the "Angelfire Experience," but soon became mandatory, I would assume when the company accountants stopped scratching their heads and realised that they needed cash and they needed it fast.

Well, we all know how well the advertising-based web business models ended up working out, but that can be excused, since no one really knew what he was doing back then. As easy as it is to rail on Nortel and the dot-coms today, it was just as easy to get carried away in their lofty heights. And you know what? It happened. That's why we're here now. It's just kind of disheartening to see so many people just try to deny that they were swept up in the whole mess. Who could have known? I'm sure some did, but it was far from conventional wisdom. Now, it's stated as a matter of course, and we all wipe our hands clean of it, as if we had nothing to do with it.

Anyways, to my original point. I can't do anything about the popup ads. They're there, and the best way to deal with them (if you don't pay attention to the product or service being promoted), is to ignore them and leave them in the background. Killing one is pointless, as another will pop up eventually to take its place. Of course, I in no way condone or endorse the usage of any product or service promoted by these ads. I don't even know what's being pushed! Don't worry, I understand the folks at Angelfire and whoever they happen to be owned by at the present time need to make money and stay in business, but I don't have to have anything to do with it directly.

So, why don't I just move the site to some other place? Well, if my brief history lesson has taught you anything, it ought to be that the face of the web has been undergoing constant change since the very beginning, much like the face of the earth itself back in those primordial days of heavy volcanic activity, when the planet was still in its infancy. My URL, https://www.angelfire.com/ca/RedTide/, comparatively speaking, is ancient. Call it nostalgia, or call it misplaced geekish pride, but I'm hanging on to this as long as I possibly can. . .

Khoa
February, 2002