My time away from the internet was short because in 1997 Sega released NetLink the 28.8 modem for the Sega Saturn. I bought the NetLink for $199.99 at Toys R Us, which was a crazy high price for the time and the primary reason Sega did not sell very many units. This time around instead of having a mostly free service, I had to pay a monthly charge to an ISP for $12.99 a month. I was willing to pay this because it had at actual internet access and it had a web browser. My first web browser took days and days of my life away. I spent sleepless nights looking at web pages. I found search engines (excite, yahoo), looking at pictures, new sites, hearing music, personal web pages, newsgroups, porn, hobbies, and even created my own web site at GeoCities. My addiction to email was then turned to chatting on the internet. I chatted mainly in Pagan - Wicca chat on Wbs.net, which was a web based chat room. I created my first chat user name AzraelX, named after my favorite comic book character Azrael. This introduced me to my first online relationships, cyber sex, and meeting people via the internet. The NetLink could also play games against other people, but this time I never used the feature at all even though it was free. The NetLink quickly started to have issues as the internet was quickly evolving. The NetLink could not support frames on web pages which started popping up on many sites, it could not support java or java script, it could not play movies at all such as Real Player, QuickTime and Windows Media Player became popular, it could not view email attachments or emails in html format, it could not display pages that had shockwave or flash on them, and it could not play the new "in thing" mp3 music files. The final nail in the coffin for the NetLink was when my best friend Nick got a computer and showed me the game Quake, which could only be played on a computer.

In 1998 I went to Incredible Universe, and bought my first computer for $900.00. At the time a sub $1000 computer was unheard of, but the computer I got was stripped down and very low end. It had an AMD K5 75mhz cpu, with 8mb of ram, 1gb hard drive, 2mb video card, a 33.6 modem, a 15 inch monitor, running Windows 95, with no CD drive and no sound card. I eventually added what it was missing and upgraded it at least once a month. I continued to spend a lot of time looking at web sites, chatting in chat rooms, but 4 new things started to take almost all my free time. First was my first instant messenger program ICQ. At first on ICQ I mainly chatted with people I knew from online chat rooms, but it had a search feature where I found other people in my area and people who had similar interests. I quickly chatted with over 100 people by meeting people through other people. The second thing that started to take over was downloading and creating mp3 music. This was at the dawn of Winamp and one of the first portable mp3 players the Rio. At the time downloading a song over the modem may have taken hours to even over night. To find songs, you had to know who or where there was an ftp hosting the songs. You had to get the mp3's while you can before the site was shut down. Even creating mp3's at this time was daunting. It would take over an hour to copy a music CD to my computer and then many more hours to convert the music to MP3. I slowly built up a song collection. The third thing to take my time was the game Quake and particularly a free add-on to it called Team Fortress. My life started to revolve around this game. All my computer upgrades were revolved around it, and it lead me to getting a cable modem with @home which raised my monthly internet bill to $79.99 a month. The fourth thing that I started to get in to was IRC chat was directly related to the third. In team fortress in order to play completive you had to join a clan. The main way to communicate with your clan mates and other clans outside the game was via IRC chat rooms. So I would run MiRC 24 hours a day to keep up with the game. Through out 1998 almost all my free time was on the internet and I even how to network computers together and use a Proxy server to share 1 internet connection,  until some changes at the end of 1998 finally started to cut down my time on the internet. I started to work full time, going to dance clubs, hanging out with friends more and meeting people I knew through the internet.

This trend of less time on the internet continued in to 1999 to the point where I would rarely play online games, and would only check my email, chat programs and websites for a few minutes a day. One late night after work I was checking my away messages on ICQ when I had a message from a woman from Texas. We chatted for about 15minutes, and I learned she was going to be arriving in my town in a few days and wanted to see if we could meet and hang out where her dad was playing a music gig at a coffee shop. We had never spoken before, I had no idea what she looked like and only knew about the few things we talked about in those 15minutes, but I decided what the heck and met her anyway. After meeting her we immediately started dating and now all my free time was mainly with her. I stopped using the internet for days at a time and the only major thing I did on the internet was purchase fadedtimes.com at the end of August. In December I joined the Navy and went to boot camp. I was completely disconnected from the outside world for 6 weeks. I did not stay in the Navy, but upon returning home in January 2000 I did not resume using the internet and moved to Texas with the woman I met in February.

The first few months of 2000 in Texas I did not have any extra money, so I did not have internet. Just before summer I did get DSL internet for $89.99 a month. I found some new things once I got back on the net, that quickly sucked me back in to all my free time. Napster was the first thing to hook me. Never before did I have access to so many different songs and I spent hours searching and downloading hundreds of songs. I also started creating music CD's with my first CD burner drive. Then a new game called Counter Strike got me back in to online gaming. I started to play with clans again, so I went back to using IRC chat and a new voice internet communication tool called Roger Wilco. Roger Wilco allowed the team to communicate real-time, instead of typing text to each other while playing in a competitive match. I was back addicted to the internet for the rest of 2000.

January 2001, the birth of my son Justin curbed my internet use for most of 2001. I went back to only using the internet a few minutes a day, as being a new father took up my free time. It was not until the December of 2001 that another online game called Everquest brought me back to sitting on the internet.

An upward use of the internet swept up in 2002. A new file sharing program called Kazaa introduced me to a new hobby of downloading full movies off the internet for free and before they even went to video and I got back in to downloading music again. Then I started listening to internet radio using live365. I found new artists and songs while listening to live365 and would find and download the songs from Kazaa. In April I signed up for yahoo.com and started using Yahoo messenger to keep in contact with people from my work. In July I setup an eBay account and started to sell my extra computer parts and games. I also setup my first official blog using LiveJournal. I started doing daily updates and even sometimes doing multiple updates through the day. I reconnected with people I use to know in California and people I had previously chatted with online over the years. Some time during 2002 I became fluent with writing and hack at programming code. I mainly wrote in visual basic and could hack through C++ code. Just to be clear on what I mean by hack, is use this definition (It may refer to a clever or quick fix to a computer program problem, or to a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem. The term is also used to refer to a modification of a program or device to give the user access to features that were otherwise unavailable) and not this definition. I wrote Visual basic programs to copy files across networks, schedule tasks and run commands on remote machines. I also modified the source code for VNC viewer and server, I disabled and modified existing features. VNC allows you to remotely view and control another computer over a network. In July I moved to a house more closer to my work and built a second computer. With the move I changed back to cable internet service. In October I added a image gallery on fadedtimes.com dedicated to the comic book goth girl who represents Death. This was only time my website had any major traffic as people downloaded my pictures and used them as forum, blog or instant messenger icons.

What about 2003 and beyond? Well in 2003 I moved to Austin, TX and bought my first internet router. In 2004 I finally quit playing Everquest. In 2005 I started using a new way to download music using eMule  and signed up for GMail to use as my main email account. In 2006, I started playing World of Warcraft an online game with Team Speak for real-time voice chatting, bought my first Wireless router, and connected my new Wii to the internet, the first video game console to connect to the internet since 1997 with my Sega Saturn. With the Wii it had an online game store to download classic games, news/weather channels, downloadable system updates, and an internet browser. The only online feature I used was the download classic games and system updates. In 2007, I signed up for MySpace for social networking, started to use Skype for instant messaging, used Ventrilo for real-time voice chat, I bought my first laptop which had wireless internet access and got an Xbox 360 which I used to stream music from my wireless laptop to my surround sound system. In 2008, I signed up for FaceBook social networking, LinkedIn for professional networking and Twitter for micro blogging.