One day in the fall of 1999, there was a Slashdot discussion about the fact that Network Solutions' dictatorial iron grip was beginning to finally be loosened, and that other registrars were now able to register domain names. Among the fun new implications of this development were the fact that a number of these new registrars, unlike Network Solutions, allowed you to have so-called profanities in domain names. Someone participating in that Slashdot thread pointed out that, as of that moment, one could still snap up a domain name starting with an impolite word and ending with Microsoft.com.

That was the only impetus that your friendly webmaster needed to rush to action. With nothing much to do at work that day (as webmaster of the now-defunct Voila.com), I rushed off and registered the domain name, along with a few other colorful ones. I also noticed that a particularly juicy anti-Apple name wasn't taken yet, and not wanting to see it get snatched up by a cluebag 12-year-old whose idea of professional graphics software is Microsoft Word Art, I registered it for the sole purpose of doing nothing with it (well, other than putting up a smart-ass intercept page). Since then, I've registered a few other domain names to point to the site.

This is my one fun website. Sure, being exploi — er, employed by the obscenely overrated AGENCY.COM in New York and working on high-visibility client sites like British Airways, Met Life, Texaco, and the like are good for one's résumé, but it threatened to sap the soul out of me (and ultimately it did, at which point a corpulent wart of a middle manager summarily fired me). Perhaps there's something about this kind of torture that makes me want to work harder on this site. I say this because I found that the site grew the most during the six months I tortured myself at my worst job ever, as webmaster of the insipid, poorly designed corporate intranet of Quick & Reilly/Fleet Securities, Inc. (a soulless Wall Street brokerage firm — or is that redundant?). At this job, I sat and browsed Slashdot and various other news and community websites for 95% of my "workday," and manually converted meaningless memos from Word document to HTML. I did this all on my "corporate standard" desktop, an utter-garbage Compaq Windows NT box that, despite being an 800-mhz Pentium III, ran slower than the G3/450 I had at home at the time. That basically constituted my job capacity as "being charged with content updates to the corporate intranet." But alas, the bills, the mortgage, and the five-digit credit card debt had to be paid, so I climbed onto that dull grey commuter bus to Manhattan every morning, half-dead, reminding myself of Aretha Franklin singing over the closing credits of Malcolm X, that someday, we'll all be free. And to get myself through those rough days, I poured even more heart and soul into the public_html directory you see spread out before you now.

But, uhh, getting back to what I was saying: This is, in direct opposition to the meaningless websites I've worked on for others over the years, my website. And unlike those other sites, this one is fun for me. It's this website that I was working on as I used my PowerBook G3 on the aforementioned dull grey commuter bus, not job-related projects. (With Mac OS X — a BSD-based UNIX — running Photoshop, BBEdit, a few web browsers, and Apache+PHP, this is one lean, mean mobile web development/staging server machine.)

The sites I've had to work on during my years in the Dantean hell known as employment may have been able to exploit my talents for use on their corporate mouthpiece websites, but they never captured my interest, my passion, my heart. They probably never will. I save that for those things in life that genuinely do interest me, and this website is one of them. This website is the kind of thing I got into the Internet for in the first place, as a college student in 1994. Not brochureware; not asinine, brain-dead e-commerce sites with moronic sock puppet commercials; and definitely not for dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks startups with business plans that read like Mad Libs puzzles filled in by autistic business school dropouts who overdosed on cat tranquilizer. I do it because I actually have something to say.

It's very telling, I think, that so many people find it easy to get stirred up and passionate over hating Microsoft, but comparatively few can be found who have passion or zeal for Microsoft. Linux fans, BSD fans, UNIX fans, Apple fans — and I'm all of the above — we all are known for our devotion, our absolute, inalienable conviction that we're right. But who ever met a real, unpaid Microsoft advocate — someone with no connection to the company whatsoever — who had the kind of steadfast conviction that we do? (Witness the world's collective yawn in response to the launch of Windows XP.) Sure, there's a few of them, but then again, there's also a few black Republicans in America, too.

This is the only page on this site where I refer to myself as "me," so enjoy it. If you're one of the relatively few people who clicked on this "About This Site" link, you're in on this little secret of mine.

Oh, but this site is also here to express deep and sincere hatred for Microsoft and its predatory, anti-competitive business practices, too. And its mind-bogglingly inferior software. Can't forget that, can we?

Some Slightly More Technical Information

Microsuck is hosted (for free!) by the good people at Rapture Security in Anaheim, California — a place where I'd much rather be myself. (Well, maybe not Anaheim proper, but one of the nicer Orange County suburbs would do just fine.) It is presently hosted on a dual-processor Pentium III/733 system running Linux.

This site's connection to the Internet is currently some sort of fiber link that's faster than a few T-1s, but not dramatically so. (What the exact bandwidth is, I'm not really sure. I'm 3,000 miles away, after all.) Since this site still receives a relatively low amount of traffic, even after being on the Internet for over four years, even the current connection is far more than it needs.

This site is currently developed, on a 1 GHz Macintosh PowerBook G4 — the last of the 15-inch models — running Mac OS X. This is a heavenly work environment, because it has all the development goodies and backend server software, all in one sexy, portable slab with battery life that puts any Wintel notebook to shame.