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As with all addictions, it started off in a small way.

When I still owned a Commodore 64, BBSes were the big thing, and my best friend and I would spend hours online keeping up with messageboards and downloading various demos and SID tunes. Later on we upgraded to Amiga, and the bulletin boards became more elaborate, and the downloads took longer (MODs, computer demos, and so on), even with faster modems (and my friend had a USRobotics Courier HST, one of the fastest modems available at the time). I also used to visit IRC (Internet Relay Chat) a lot, but then I moved away and moved in with someone and I no longer took an interest in it. But I finally had my own primary e-mail account on dial-up, and I was more than happy to wander around the internet whenever I could freely occupy the phone line.

I still kept in touch with my friends back home via ICQ, but after a while everyone started migrating to Yahoo and MSN, so of course I had to sign up with those services (at the time, there was no inter-connectivity the way there is now). Eventually I discovered Trillian, which allowed me to keep up with all of my contacts through one client. In the meantime, I started signing up for other e-mail accounts just for the heck of it...mainly to see what was different. Yahoo and MSN were way out in front, but Lycos was decent.

Then came DSL.

With a high-speed, always-on connection, there was no excuse to not be at the computer. When I wasn't working or doing things with my partner, I would spend hours online...chatting with friends, bookmarking websites, watching videos, listening to radio stations...it was endless. Then I got a more powerful computer with a larger hard drive and the mania increased...I had three different browsers on my hard drive, changing from one to the other as each one got on my nerves (as browsers always do). I had accounts with all of the major portals and several minor ones.

Then I got my first blog.

I really got into blogging...not only could I find all this cool stuff on the internet, but I could share it with my friends and we could discuss it, just like old-school bulletin boards! Of course, then the different flavors of blogs became apparent to me. Community-oriented blogs, lifestyle-oriented blogs, hobby-oriented blogs...it was all there. Soon I was juggling three different blogs and trying to decide what to do with the ones that the portals were adding.

Then came the social networking sites. At this point I found myself between jobs due to

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