A/S/L Love

My school was one of the first in the country to have an internet connection, thanks to rich old boys, and that was where I got my first taste of the internet. That was back in 1996, when internet was just a fledgling technology in Malaysia. I learned about Yahoo and Hotmail and mIRC there, then of course the holy trinity of the internet. The time when connecting to the internet alone takes 10 minutes and the teet-krek-krek-toot was a welcomed sound, and getting disconnected was a common occurance.

I used Yahoo up until 2005 or so when I converted to Google, I'm still using the same Hotmail account that I registered back then and who can forget mIRC? All the cool cats and copycats were spending their time on mIRC back then. I used a few different nicks like feuersturm and dressler, and was a regular on #warisan (for SBPians kan?) school-centric channels like #sunset, #overfloor, #sylvatica, and some others I can't even recall now. When I'm bored I would change my nick to something inviting like liana^love and join common channels like #mamak or #metropolitan and enjoy the sudden burst of private messages asking "hi, a/s/l?". Boy we sure had fun back then ;)

Oh to this particular guy, I'm sorry I lead you on. We made plans to meet up, he said he's in Damansara area so I said let's meet in Uptown (back when Uptown was THE place to hang out), eventhough I'm in Kuala Kangsar. I told him I'll be wearing a skirt with a blue top. Tsk tsk tsk liana^love, kesian dia...

Then cybercafes started sprouting up everywhere, even in sleepy Kuala Kangsar. Some people would go to play computer games like CM3, Command & Conquer, Warcraft, Diablo etc, while I go to code. I learnt HTML coding from Yam during one of those boring computer classes when the teacher would teach us how to use Microsoft Word *yawn*. Visits to cybercafes on weekends would see me coding and later updating my first 'blog', that was back in 1998 or so. It was hosted on Angelfire, but I can't remember the exact URL now, pity.

Dad hooked us up to the net in 2000 I think, and we got a quota of just 40 hours to be split amongst the 3 of us siblings. So me and Pija would sometimes eat into Kimi's portion =P Nights spent online at home was usually spent downloading songs through Napster or iMesh (one song would take hours) and chatting through mIRC. There wasn't much else to do back then anyway.

These days I'm just a consumer, technology like Blogger just kills the need for me to manually code HTML like I used to. I can't hope to reach Eddie's level of web knowledge these days, or Yam's, or my brother's for that matter. My interest has moved on to other things these days but just like first loves, you'll always remember the good times you had together