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What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

My nickname started up as TNL but more and more sites started requiring longer nicks so I had to figure out how to go beyond just my initials. Living in New York City (NYC) provided a quick way to expand it. Hence from TNL, I became TNLNYC. In the past, I've also been known as "The Sarcastic French" (pre-internet BBS nick and later my dark doppleganger on LambdaMOO) and Net-Runner (mainly used on Usenet and IRC) but TNL seemed to stay with me as short and sweet (TNL was also the nickname of my main character and LambdaMOO)

My life on the Internet started many moons ago, back in 1988. Back then, I was spending a lot of time on BBSes and I read somewhere that there was this thing called the Internet that was available only in universities. I managed to get a couple of college guys I need from the BBS world to land me an account on the NCSU vax machine. From there, it was all downhill as they say.

More and more time was spent online and, when I finally got a chance to make it to college myself, one of the first thing I did was arrange to get net access. Things took a strange turn, however, in 1993, when I decided that I wanted to start *gasp* an online magazine and post archives of my FAQ mailing list online. I looked at gopher but someone pointed to the work done by a few swiss guys at CERN. The next day, I ended up finding a NeXT station and getting into my first web browser experience. From there, I downloaded the web server and, with the help of a few fellow net geeks, managed the first port of httpd to SunOS. We then installed it on sunsite.unc.edu. It crashed many times but eventually, we managed to get a web server that was a bit stable and I launched "@ The Edge", a newsletter about the internet.

1993 came and I graduated and moved to New York. While desperately looking for Internet access, I met the folks at the Dorsai Embassy and started spending more time there (anything for direct access to a T1 :) )

In 1994, I was approached by Michael Wolff & Co. to start writing about the Internet for the Net.Guide book series. A few months later, I got a call from Internet World and within a few weeks was working in Connecticut. While there, I got funding for iWORLD, the precursor for Internet.com which I spend building for the next couple of years. At the same time, I launched TNL.net and started building and building and building.... and that was just the beginning of a crazy ride.

... and now I'm building a company that makes software to make the world a better place at Casebook