i am a self-professed geek. if you didn't know that tidbit about me before today i'm going to endeavor to prove it to you in this little exercise. during my torturous bus ride home last night (i couldn't go three weeks of taking the n judah without a serious disruption in service, could i?) i started to think about all of the email addresses that i've had over the years.

now i know that most people get email accounts with their college id cards from their jobs but it looks like i've taken acquiring email accounts to a whole new level. in fact, somewhere in the sudan there are ten people starving without email accounts because i hogged them all.

now i have to admit, i started emailing earlier than a lot of other people. i got my first account when i was a senior in high school and i think the address was glee@ctep.edu. it was provided by some educational group and i remember emailing my buddy who had just gotten into berkeley about this "cool" new technology. i followed that up with a free email account on slip.net (poohbear@slip.net). this account was cool because slip.net had a free dial-up number that i could use to access my mail from anywhere. i think ended up giving this account to my friend howard so that he could check email from home.

then i got to college. stand back... there are going to be a lot of email addresses flying at you from this period. because i was originally enrolled in uc berkeley's extension program-- i couldn't get a traditional uclink account. to make up for this i signed up with the fine folks over at ocf and got glee@ocf.berkeley.edu. when they finally let us get uclink accounts-- they made us sign up with uclink2-- and we then got gillee@uclink2.berkeley.edu.

in order to be cool like my other friends-- i went by the computer science undergraduate assocation (csua) and got gillee@csua.berkeley.edu. extracurricular groups at cal were able to get hosting space from a free server on campus so after i became president of alpha phi omega i got gillee@server.berkeley.edu so that we could move our website to their server. (that never fully happened). yeah, i know this is getting boring...
so i'll just list out a couple of more addresses.

glee@haas.berkeley.edu (yes, i fooled them into giving me an account-- they killed it shortly thereafter)
wwwgeo@seismo.berkeley.edu (for my webmaster job for the dept of geology)
apmp@alumni.berkeley.edu (asian pacific mentorship program)
gillee@alum.calberkeley.org (my "permanent" alumni account)

admittedly, signing up for the csua and ocf accounts was pretty smart because i still have files hosted on their computers.

i'm sure i was assigned others but i can't seem to remember them... they were probably all issued from classes like ids anyways-- so no big deal....

then there were the accounts that i got from my isp's... gilbertl@sirius.com, gilklee@pacbell.net, gillee@netzero.net, gillee@altavista.net...

then there were the accounts from the free webmail services. at first i just wanted to check out which ones had the best user interfaces and the best tools but they soon became a good way to filter/segegrate my email.... gillee@mailexcite.com (now gillee@excite.com), gillee@hotmail.com, gillee@email.com, gillee@hotbot.com, gilklee@yahoo.com (i can't believe i didn't get gillee@yahoo.com), etc. etc.

of course i shouldn't forget the email addresses that i use for my personal projects...gil@gkelly.net, mrg@draftnik.com, gilbert@bowlcut.com, gilbert@beefyfolk.com...

i think that the bulk of the email messages that i've read in my life would still fall under my old work email, gilbert@ticketweb.com. i have a feeling that the email address on my new (ok, i haven't signed anything yet) business card will be gilbert.lee@i-channel.com (how corporate) and i think that may be the end of my email binge for a while.

i'm just glad that i've never had an aol.com following my name....

oh. i'm not a geek because i've had a lot of email addresses--- i'm a geek because i could actually remember most of them-- and because i wrote this stupid blog about the addresses....