Yo

I’m writing this journal for a number of reasons:

• First and foremost, I’m a narcissistic bastard.
• I wrote a dead-tree journal for a few years last decade, and I got a kick out of it.
• I am so lame about communicating with those close to me that perhaps this will be a bridge towards actually maintaining connections.
• I read a few blogs, and I find them entertaining; perhaps someone else will find this one so.

Next question: what is up with “aerosolkid”? Well, long story…

I am a fan of Genesis & Peter Gabriel. “Rael”, the protagonist of the 1974 Genesis album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, was (warning - major geek alert) the name of my main Dungeons & Dragons character He was a gnome, if you were wondering. As I drifted into computer-land, it became the name I used when I didn’t want to use my real (rael, get it?) name.

Unfortunately, I am also a textbook example of the maxim “The cobler’s children go shoeless”: I’ve been hacking since 1988, frolicking on the Internet for more than a decade. But, even when I was watching a Toyota commercial in 1995 that had a URL in it – and it made me go “whoa, check that out…”, sensing the tectonic shift on the horizon – I did not have the vision to jump on it. I profitted not one bit from the dot com boom, even though on an unconcious level I saw it coming. Oh, well. Whatever. Hell of a ride, though, eh?

But, that also means that I didn’t strike when the iron was hot when it came to grabbing domain names for myself. So, “mpc.com” is not mine. And, “rael.com” is probably where you go to for clones.

So, I needed a new name. Well, there’s a lyric in the song The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway:

Rael Imperial Aerosol Kid

So, “aerosolkid” it is.

Aren’t you glad you asked?