About this time ten years ago, my personal website was moved to the current address: yong321.freeshell.org. In the twenty years of history of my website, freeshell.org is the most stable location, in spite of occasional downtime.
In late 1996 or early 1997, I set up a personal website on a university computer to learn the burgeoning technology, have fun, distribute customers' feedback on the local businesses, and help me land my first job after school. The customers' feedback webpage may be the first in the history of the Internet. I solicited comments from fellow students in this college town through emails and verbal communication. They sent in comments and I manually edited and posted them to my site. Alas, for lack of business talent and skills, this once popular webpage was going nowhere and is now surpassed by such giants as yelp.com, which is worth $3.5 billion today.
Over the years, the website drifted toward tech-savvy as my career changed into IT. A few technical articles, many small notes, and a few freeware programs attracted attention. Recently the higher traffic went to non-tech content, especially my multi-language translator, and the Chinese translation of article titles in the sinology magazine T'oung Pao. What is unchanged is the moderate but stable traffic to my online game Card 24 which was the first to be brought to the Internet (in early 2004) even though Wikipedia refuses to list it. (I edited their 24 Game page but my addition was removed by the moderator for suspicion of self-promotion!)
Polymaths, or persons of lots of curiosity and learning, have long since been out of fashion and are incompatible with our age of technology and specialized skills. And yet, just as a genetically disabled human has no fault of his own, being born to be at a loss of what to do in his lifetime is nothing to blame, so long as he is making a living and, as a side effect, contributing something to the human kind.
December 2017
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