Hi everyone. Thought I'd join up as it looks like a nice, friendly place to chat about web development and related stuff.

I work from home via internet part time for a small web hosting company. I am the CGI server admin, I do some programming (well, scripting - perl), and PHP/MySQL stuff as well as anything from ASP 2.0, .NET, MS SQL, Access 2000, XML, "regular" HTML/CSS web pages, etc. Though I haven't got into SOAP, AJAX, etc. yet and don't know much Java. I do some JavaScript though (which I know isn't Java ) I design sites for new services they might want to roll out from time to time, maintain the main site FAQ and other areas. Pretty much any hat that the boss needs me to wear. LOL!

I've been designing web sites since oh... Netscape first come out! Seriously, I remember using Netscape (then it was just "Netscape"), Windows Notepad and Trumpet Winsock in Windows 3.1 to create pages. Back then the only color background you got was dull grey and the only link colors were purple for visited and blue for unvisited. There was no such thing as images either! I remember when GIFs first were supported. I think it started out as only so many colors and that's it. I remember being glad when I could use 256 color GIFs! Back then, you designed pages that fit in 640 x 480 monitors!

My how things have changed! I get lost just thinking about all the different things that one can do on the internet now! When they were saying we would some day be able to order goods and pay bills online and stuff, I thought they were nuts. LOL!

My hobbies include music, gardening, crafts, digital art, scrapbooking, digital photography, robots (I have 8), researching Artificial Intelligence (even though we are long ways away from having something for real right now, it's still interesting). But it varies. I mean sometimes I kinda let some hobbies slide for awhile.

I'm looking forward to conversations here. Hopefully learn some new things, and share what I already know.