I've been frequently asked about that, and over the past several years, each time I answered that, I gave different perspectives. This one will be different from the previous ones.

Let me give you a brief description of revision histories of my homepages, which were not formally numbered and I regret about not keeping good track of it.

When the idea of WWW was first introduced in early 90's, I uploaded my first WWW page which barely filled one page with the personal informations and a picture of me. It was probably one of the first batch of few thousands homepages available at that time.

After having personal homepage in WWW, I started put papers I wrote on a homepage, which was in either ascii or postscript format. If anyone asks for my paper, I email them "Download from my homepage". Gopher was more popular and wide-spread at that time than WWW sites, but as for the individual level, uploading and downloading of files from WWW sites was handier than gopher sites. It was a trend at that time among people in academic world. I was at the right place at the right time.

Although a few people downloaded my papers from my homepage, I was complacent that I had a homepage of my own, like the people around me.

WWW began to flourish, and lots of junks began to fill the internet; even though modem speed got faster, accessing homepages became time consuming because of junks hindering the internet traffic. Surfing the net was not much of a pleasant pass time to do anymore. Culling out junks before I find the right source was time consuming and painful.

I tried to be more informative with my homepage and opened a site with hacking information and maintainded a bulletin board with other hackers. It might not be quite right ethically, but I had a good reasoning for it and believed (still belive) that all information must be shared and opened to public regardless of its moral values.

We exchanged lots of valuable hacking informations, and more technically about UNIX and C programming, UNIX system administration, and software development. By the time it was a burden to maintain a bullitin board while going to school, my ISP notified me that it shut down my site as my site contained contents which went againt the ISP's policies.

Although I had backups of the contents, I couldn't find the commercial site where I could open a homepage with hacking/programming informations and a bulletin board. I setup the site with my home PC for a while, but decided to give up maintaining hacker's site, which some people objected and hated, although I received more encouraging emails fro visitors.

While maintaining hacker's site, I learned a lot on programming and saw the huge potential of the internet and WWW sites. People frequently talked about YAHOO and Netscape Mosaic was being developed by the orgincal NCSA Mosaic team. No one in our bulletinboard imagined that they would be so famous, succesful and rich in a couple of years while we talked about them.

With one of my several homepage sites gone, I lost interests in developing contents of homepage for a while, but soon revived it to make an electronic portfolio of my art works. I digitized my drawings and paintings on the traditional medium into the electronic file format, and was developing a virtual gallery of my art works until I realized I needeed a huge disk space and gave up.

It took too much space and too much time to download heavy graphics over the modem/phone line. Visitors couldn't enjoy my art works much as they had to endure the boredom of downloading time. Several months was long enough to go over my past art works, and I decided to wait more to build virtual gallery.

Instead of virtual portfolio, I decided to keep a virtual notepages of my scripts, notes, papers and essays. It will never be complete, and constantly added or removed. As I named it notepages, I was less worried about format as it can be loosely formatted and maintained. Even so I need to put some useful information to others, which must be beneficial and informative to the visitors.

Searching for something which might be useful to other is difficult and time-consuming. But think this way. If it's useful to me, it might be useful to others. If not, who cares? I started to upload various tips which is computer related. I'm frequently getting thank-you emails from the visitors who used my tips and tutorials.

Now I see the most useful function of a homepage. I setup personal web server which contains most of my works. My homepage at home server has links to most of my works, past, present, and future. A catalog of art works is stored and linked. As for the digitzied drawings, it's stored and linked. If the drawing is not digitized yet, there's a description of it is there for easy reference to it.

As for my past writings; full document is there if it's in ascii or formatted forms; if it's type-written, I scanned the whole page and stored it; or sometimes I use OCR to convert it to text-based one; as for the hand-written essays, I have no choice but to scan the first couple of pages to sort out and put a summary of it. Most of my writings are taken care of.

As for writings of other people which I refer frequently, I scanned the first couple of pages and put a summary of it with keywords, and sorted it out according to the various keywords. Accessing the informations I collected over the years has never been as easy as these days, and I have an almost complete database of what I have now. I can't put all I have, but even with this much done, I'm really happy came at this.

So, the homepage you are visiting nowadyas is the stripped and downsized version of what I have at home. I frequently hear from visitors these days that the consistency of my homepage is crooked; and yes, that's true. I used to have a homepage which was to be seen to others; now my homepage is stripped-down version, of which I decide to share with others hiding from the areas which I don't want to share with others. Even so, I try to share as much as with others, thanking the people and netizens who shared their collections with me.

Time flows; moral changes; value changes; objective changes; and you have to accept whatever it changes. (Mar-15-98)