So why a personal site? I mean, why is this here? What could possibly be so important about one weird guy that it would need to be posted for the world to see? Well, lets start with where it all began. In the winter of 1996, some friends and I decided to throw a rave. It was a pretty big production, and with an investment of about $30,000, it was about the largest party that I have ever been involved with throwing. Well, we decided it would help to have a website about the party. Thus was born L-Dopah.com. After the party was a bust and we lost our shirts, we never paid the internic bill, L-Dopah.com went defunct, and the website that I spent about 2 hours building was floating somewhere in cyberspace. About a year later, we got the brilliant idea to resurrect L-Dopah, throw another party, and re-registered the name, now under ldopah.com. We had a professional designer design the website for it, complete with flash. I had a guy who I worked with that had server space and gave us our own IP address, and as much space as we liked. After the site was built and posted, I was sort of left to maintain it, although it didn’t need much updating. I created a directory called www.ldopah.com/rick and it was where I’d put any photos I wanted to send to people. Rather than attaching them to e-mails, I’d post them and send a URL instead. Well, then stories went up there. It was mostly things about the cars. I was on mailing lists, and I’d send off pictures and stories about the cars to the mailing list when the topics were appropriate. It was never designed to be viewed by the public. No search engines would ever lead you there. Eventually, people would chop off file names to see what was at www.ldopah.com/rick and it was blank. So I put up an index page with a list of everything on there. The next thing you know, I was hooked. I enjoyed putting together the pages. The big break to this website was the EuroWander website. I went to Europe for about 5 weeks and had 2 weeks off when I got back. I took my journal, typed it up, added photos and made the EuroWander webpage. I sent it off to about 50 people who I’d kept in touch with while I was traveling and they wanted to hear all the stories. A lot of people read it all the way through, despite its length, and many forwarded it to friends. By this time, the "/rick" part of the website was getting more hits than the rest of the page. I ended up staying late at work one night to make up a cleaner front page. I started with a “menu” style layout, breaking my ramblings in to 4 or 5 sections. Then I decided to do a standard yin/yang with cars and travels, but I wanted the site to be a little more, so I came up with the 4 way yin/yang. Then, when the other members of L-Dopah agreed that our web presence wasn’t vital to our staying in business (seeing as we were no longer in business), we took it down, and I took control of the server space and registered travelhead. It was either that or carhead, which I didn’t like as much. The plans for the site go way beyond what it is now. Someday, I’m going to get up and travel the world and I’ll post my journeys here for people to see. I would do it now, but being in the tech industry, there is too much opportunity to not wait another couple of years. I really believed that this is the golden era of technology, and that in 2-3 years, these opportunities wont be as prevalent. So, I hope to continue to make my fortune, and take off when the time is right. Then Travelhead.com will have its IPO.