It was an interesting period, this time with Everything2. I suddenly had to find something else to do on the internet. But where else could I find a page telling about someones feeling on
The difficulties of keeping to an ideal or
Live Nude Lesbians.
So what did I find? Well I proofread a couple of dozen pages for distributed proofreaders. Although this gave me a little warm fuzzy feeling inside from the fact that I was doing something to help humanity in the future, it just didn't have the same feeling of really giving something right now that people could appreciate.
So I turned to wikipedia. Now here was something like Everything2 but it still isn't quite right. I found it to be too structured - anything you wrote in an article had to be on topic and in no way show any opinion that wasn't held by a certain group. So you couldn't say that you hated Gigili, you had to say that every critic in the country hated it.
And then there was the fact that there were no stories, or stupid writeups about the time someone crushed their foot under a huge boulder or whatever.
Also I missed people linking ideas to emphasise them. Or linking a phrase. It all just seemed a bit sterile. There wasn't a community, just a whole lot of people worldwide who daily went to the same website.
But there were things that I like about wikipedia. If I didn't like an article I could change it. Of course this wouldn't work at E2 were personal opinions are allowed. But there were everything had to be Neutral Point of View it does and allows articles to grow.
I also liked the markup language that meant I didn't have to worry about paragraphs etc - I could just type away and it would present the page in the correct way.
So anyway this time without E2 has allowed me to discover that there is something other than this website to spend all my waking hours at. Something that helped was the fact that we never knew when it would be back online. You could log onto the internet everyday wondering whether today would be the day - only to be met by a picture of a computer or someones car.
On completely unrelated news I've finally finished my secondary education and move next year into tertiary education at the University of Canterbury in Christchuch, New Zealand. And I was named Dux for 2003 at Verdon College. This is the highest academic award at a secondary school and basically means that you were the smartest person of that years leaving class.