So, nine years.

This blog began while I was living in Japan as a way of keeping in touch with friends and family around the globe. It was originally called “PolMach”—short for “political machine”—because I also used it to keep tabs on and stay connected to my elected officials back in the US. Yeah, I used to care about politics and such. I’m still in recovery.

Later, this site took on the name of one of my online identities until I eventually left off “Skajlab”—the Polish spelling of the space station Sky Lab that crashed back to earth in 1979—and kept just “Crash Course.” For the past few years, I’ve been changing the number to reflect the total of years I’ve maintained the blog. In my banner, I used to always include an image of the satellite.

Back then, I didn’t have my own URL, so everything was carefully typed out in HTML (version 4, I believe) using WordPad and uploaded to the free server on Angelfire. There were no widgets. No web cam. No such thing as RSS. Even the word “blog” had yet to be invented. I didn’t know anyone else at the time who did such a thing. The only thing that has remained consistent in the online world is pop-up ads.

Now we have all the technology we could ever ask for. It took less than an hour to arrange my new page, including purchasing the domain name. Back when I could only use embedded frames, I would end up tweaking the design for weeks. So, I finally “splurged” on my very own blog URL: http://mycrashcourse.net/. I decided I wanted to disassociate it from my business site altogether. And hell, my little blog deserves its own web address: it’s lasted longer (and has been more interesting) than most relationships I’ve known!

Welcome, Willkommen, Bienvenue, Witaj, Irashaimasu, Bienvenido, Dobro pozhalovat’! And please update your links.

Yours,
François

So, nine years.

This blog began while I was living in Japan as a way of keeping in touch with friends and family around the globe. It was originally called “PolMach”—short for “political machine”—because I also used it to keep tabs on and stay connected to my elected officials back in the US. Yeah, I used to care about politics and such. I’m still in recovery.

Later, this site took on the name of one of my online identities until I eventually left off “Skajlab”—the Polish spelling of the space station Sky Lab that crashed back to earth in 1979—and kept just “Crash Course.” For the past few years, I’ve been changing the number to reflect the total of years I’ve maintained the blog. In my banner, I used to always include an image of the satellite.

Back then, I didn’t have my own URL, so everything was carefully typed out in HTML (version 4, I believe) using WordPad and uploaded to the free server on Angelfire. There were no widgets. No web cam. No such thing as RSS. Even the word “blog” had yet to be invented. I didn’t know anyone else at the time who did such a thing. The only thing that has remained consistent in the online world is pop-up ads.

Now we have all the technology we could ever ask for. It took less than an hour to arrange my new page, including purchasing the domain name. Back when I could only use embedded frames, I would end up tweaking the design for weeks. So, I finally “splurged” on my very own blog URL: http://mycrashcourse.net/. I decided I wanted to disassociate it from my business site altogether. And hell, my little blog deserves its own web address: it’s lasted longer (and has been more interesting) than most relationships I’ve known!

Welcome, Willkommen, Bienvenue, Witaj, Irashaimasu, Bienvenido, Dobro pozhalovat’! And please update your links.

Yours,
François