Ryu2.mind

...my blogging. Has it been this long?!

Long before blog was a word in the English language, my very first entry,written during the summer before I entered college, was posted. It evenhas my old (long-defunct) high school email address on the bottom.

Granted, my writing was sporadic to say the least until probably early 1999, when jack.html,just my friend Danny's page of links, started to take on a life of itsown in creating our own little Stanford "blogosphere" (a word for whichI'm still not hip enough to be sprinkling in my daily speech...)whereby everyone would be linking and replying to each others' entries.

BeforeI finally moved to blog software in early 2004, I manually edited byhand all the HTML for all my pages, updating the indices, etc, whichdiscouraged spur of the moment thoughts. They're still out there(albeit hidden for now... some things I wrote then were just dumb orthey might cause problems in this country) I do plan to consolidate allthose entries -- umm... someday...

Ina way, though many things -- my environment, circumstances, worldviews,and life passions -- have changed in the past 10 years, the fundamentalreason why I embrace this medium hasn't: because of my non-linear wayofthinking and formulating ideas (starting in some random place ratherthan at the beginning always, going back, jumping about, fleshingthings out, revising, revising some more) I've always found it easierto communicate in writing than in speech.

True, right nowbeing in this country in my position has forced me to watch some thingsI say in public and yes, it's something I find constricting at times.Furthermore, at the moment there doesn't seem to be a simple solutionfor more secure posting that I'm entirely satisfied with both from atechnical and ease of use perspective.

Still I hope that what Iwrite continues to encourage, enlighten, amuse, confuse, disgust, oraffect someone, someway, somehow, somewhere... and to everyone else outthere, keep it up as well!
The story behind the namePS: Might as well answer the question... why "Ryu2" as my identity in most online communities?When I first started using the Internet and IRC back in the day (late1993), I need to pick a name. The straightforward "mwang" didn't soundinteresting enough, and was generic enough that it would often betaken. This was when Street Fighter 2had just come out for the SNES so my friends and I would be playing itoften. My favorite character was Ryu, so I gravitated towards thatchoice. Unfortunately, it too would be taken oftentimes, so I justadded a 2 and it's stuck since then. And that, as they say, is that. =)