We have a consensus on Swhack that the golden age of the web was 1999,
for some reason. We were talking about our own pages from that year,
and I said I'd try to find a few of mine. As I was looking through old
discs, I also found some pages from 2000, and they showed that I was
working on web formats very early in the year. I was quite surprised
by this, because I thought I picked up web format stuff in around
August 2000, not February.

Perhaps there's not a big difference, but it was a shock to me because
around the beginning of the year I was working on a lot of art stuff.
The transition to working on technology was gradual, but this makes it
seem that it caught my attention more early than I'd thought. So it's
an important date, because a lot of my friends and hobbies are still
based on having got into web formats stuff.

Just as important is when I decided that I didn't really enjoy web
formats work anymore, which I remember came in an old essay series
that I was writing. I wrote some things about technology, and some
things which weren't about technology, and the ones which weren't
about technology were much more fun. I remembered that I wrote a post
about it, which is called Oversystematizing:

http://inamidst.com/notes/oversystematizing

The essay series went on to be one of the most fun things that I've
worked on. The idea of it is probably best exemplified by the post
where I suggest that if you put some milk in first, then tea, and then
the rest of the milk in afterwards, you will please both the milk
first and the milk last camps. Incidentally, I tended to be more of a
milk last person, and this new idea didn't really change that because
around that time I was also starting to put a lot less milk in my tea,
so it was hard to split a very small amount into before and after
portions.

This description, anyway, is trivial but novel, in a very antiquarian
way. And that's what I was trying to go for. I was also looking for
things which took real research, and to make those key. I did quite a
lot of interesting casual research for that essay series. I did even
more for the followup series, Lo and Behold!, including one where
George Orwell had asked a question about 16th century melons. That's
the kind of learned trivium that was just right for this kind of
essay.