After the fall of the Berlin Wall, being young and idealistic and thinking that people could make a difference through individual efforts, I went to Prague, Czechoslovakia, to teach English for a year. I stayed for eight years. It was just such an interesting time to be there -- and I learned a lot of useful things, like Czech (actually, that's not very useful at all, but that's OK -- as the Czechs say, "Each language you know makes you a whole new person.") I've been back in the US since 1998.
I first found out about the Internet from stories which were coming in over the wire services when I did news duty at Radio Prague, the English-language external service of Czech Radio -- where I'd gone to work in the middle of 1992, just as Czechoslovakia was voting in nationwide elections which would eventually lead to the breakup of the country by the end of that same year (see why it was such an interesting time to be there?).
Well, I knew from the wire stories that the Internet was something I just had to have access to, so I put together a proposal to connect Radio to the Internet. In 1994, I was given my own department and tasked with implementing that proposal, which included repurposing radio program transcripts and audio for the Internet, as well as creating original content for our gopher (and later, our Web) server. The next time I go through my papers I'll try to put a copy of that proposal up on these pages. It's funny, because it makes predictions like "The Internet will have more than one million users by the year 2000!" and says things like, "Already, researchers are experimenting with video and audio transmissions over the Internet!"
Anyway. As beautiful as Prague is, and as exciting as the Velvet Revolution and post-revolutionary period was, and as much as I really loved my job at Radio Prague -- in the end, I got homesick. I'd always thought that people who spend "too much" time living abroad are Really Strange, and had never, ever expected to be away from home for such a long stretch of time. Also, being from California, I just couldn't handle the winters.
Eight years is a long time, and I knew that things had to have changed while I was away. But I really hadn't expected the San Francisco Bay Area to have changed, in that time, about as much as Prague did! I guess I'm almost used to it now (not), but probably I'll never get used to being served oil with my bread instead of butter, which is what we used to get in restaurants back in my day.
As we had used both Linux and Unix back when we hooked Radio up to the Internet, I was familiar with both, so after I got back home, I worked for a while at LinuxWorld magazine (now a part of ITWorld). I had no idea, at the time I started, that the seeds of massive commercialization of Linux had already been sowed.
I have been doing freelance writing (for LinuxWorld, among others) and editing (for IBM developerWorks, among others) since January 2000. The update for spring 2001 is that I've been doing much less writing than editing lately. I've actually been too busy editing to do much writing, unfortunately -- and so any links you might find to "recent" stories will not be "recent" at all. And... since LinuxWorld's archives are in transition, most of them won't be stories either (just 404s or redirects to their new main page). I like both editing and writing, so I don't mind that I'm doing more of the former -- but it does make this site a little stagnant. So I'll be working to make it less so in my free time (that means, it'll happen very... slowly...) ...