One evening I was sitting around listening to CDs when I pulled out Ace Of Base / Cruel Summer. Looking at the track listings on the back of the case, I saw the www.aceofbase.com at the bottom. I remember back when Cruel Summer came out, and while shopping I heard the radio DJ say 'don't buy the CD, they only want your money' which made me decide right then and there that I would "never" listen to that radio station again. Period. That was our local 'power' station, and it is hard to say exactly what or who he was talking about; my guess is Arista records.Not AOB. Getting back to our history, the url stayed in my mind for a few days, until eventually I went to www.aceofbase.com. There were many 'lively' discussions and more information about the band . Ace Of Base had just released their fourth studio album, Da Capo .

The characters in the AOB forum were extremely entertaining to me, and it was the most fun I 'ever' had online. It's impossible to put into words, and hard to remember specifics. But there I was, discovering the 'world' outside of America. My first question / post was asking how to say 'ace of base rock!' in Swedish (Ace Of Base Rockar! I think was the reply). I really started to get into the community there, and it became an obsession. morning ,noon, and night (literally every chance I had) I perused the forum, which led me to the Hallo Boards (THB) - an unofficial AOB fansite.

Here I was: picked up from my lonely american existence and plopped down into a forum with people from all over europe; Germany,France,Italy,Sweden,Finland,Croatia,Estonia,the Netherlands, Great Britain, Denmark, Russia, and extending far into South America, Australia, and Asia.There were also many Americans.

It was mesmerizing, people spoke English so well it was hard to believe the ease of communications. I started discovering the 'history' of AOB , and the "do's and don'ts" of the community. Several of the forum members had just returned home from an Acers reunion in Gothenburg,Sweden. The hometown of Ace Of Base. Many pictures were posted, and it was wonderful to have the ability to place a face with the names that posted in the forum, and my love of the community grew ever larger. This is when I learned to 'save pictures' with the 'right click of the mouse.. and I saved pictures of all my new music interests, and anything else that I wanted to see again.

Another interesting thing was, that acers all liked to share AOB demo songs, yet this always led to fights in the forum. And of course you had subdivisions of fans - the Linners and the Jenners (fans who preferred Linn or Jenny singing lead vocals) and the Uffe (Ulf) fans, but only a few Joners (Jonas fans).

At this time (early 2004) I was still a regular on eBay, searching out the 'best deals' for laptops and computer parts. I was also started searching for stereo equipment, and it wasn't long before I had bought an Harman Kardon receiver,with matching cassette deck and CD player.
I was buying 'international music CDs, and there were half a dozen websites where I shopped. You can't buy Nu Virgos, Blestyashchie, Air, Leslie CDs at the local store, I'm afraid. We bought our first digital camera, a couple of DVD/VHS recorders,and a few laptops.

Since my earliest days on the computer, I had wanted to buy a couple of games that came as 'demos' on a CD-ROM bought at Walmart back around 1999 or 2000. My first purchase was Slay, and just to complete my desire I also bought World Empire V . Although I didn't spend any time playing these games online, I did ( and still do) spend many hours a week playing my 'old wargames' offline. I also searched for and found a few versions of Zone66, Space Invaders, and DOS versions of Scrabble Deluxe and Risk.

Something I neglected to mention in my early days essay was listening to UofA basketball and football games through Yahoo radio. I listened to every game I could, even taking my laptop to work on some days, to dialup and hear the games live. Later they changed the name to Rivals (still on Yahoo) and worth mentioning because I listened to hundreds of games this way. If you follow a sports team, get yourself a 'My Yahoo' page and put them on your page. Then you can check the schedule, read up on the team news, and all the happenings right from one page. It's fantastic, and I still read My Yahoo daily. Over time I added news services that I like, and there are many others services such as weather, Word of the Day, or Today in History that are great. I don't think it will ever go out of style.

The Ace Of Base community exposed me to new languages and cultures. It wasn't long before I was listening to music from Via-Gra (from Russia) and E-Type (Sweden) nearly every day. By late December 2003, I was trying to figure out a way to 'share' my pictures and stuff online. We all had 'photobucket accounts; sometimes they had heavy traffic, and it would take a minute for pictures to load. You could 'donate' to photobucket, and they would 'upgrade' your account, but I was looking for something more...

FLASH.. by January 1st 2004 I was looking at webhosts, trying to find a good deal. I cannot remember how I ended up at PensacolaMicro , , maybe I just searched for 'cheap' webhosts. They had a deal, where for $30.00 a year you got 50MB of webspace, your domain name (cleaverb.com) and good deal of bandwidth for traffic (500MB). I signed up on January 2004.. and spent the next fews days learning about posting urls to forums and stuff. Until this time,my only experience with creating webpages was by using the WYSIWYG editors on GeoCities, and so cleaverb.com was just a storage space for a few months. By the end of 2004, I was posting a few pages of text and hosting mp3s (by request) as a way to 'give back' to the beloved the hallo boards (THB) community..

Through this era, THB crashed and they lost all of our posts..so THB3 was born. I had missed out on thb1 and 2, and just caught the end of thb3 shortly after the Acer reunion. THB3 was exceptional, in that they let people post anything the wanted to say,, and there was a lot of fighting and flaming going on. Within a few months, thb3 also crashed (I think they tried to upgrade their software and the database got wiped out) and thb4 was born. With thb4 came some 'strict' censoring, where even my rambling texts would get edited into a coherent message. This was also the dawn of the SPAM era, and so the censorship was a response to the 'anonymous' visitors who posted links to their garbage. There could be more reasons, I don't know. Aceofbase.com also came out with a new design, and this time they had a better forum. A few THBers left for good.

My most memorable moment on THB was when 'sara' and 'andre' held a 'live event' ; where they posted questions in the THB forum, and people answered the questions as fast as they could. They would post a snippet of andre playing an AceOfBase song, and we would try to guess what song it was.. I got a few correct first but Josef was far better than me. He won the contest. It was alot of fun for everyone, and before long Josef was hosting his own weekly contests and drawing for AOB memorabilia.

There was also another unofficial AOB forum, theaceboards.com . The aceboards (TAB) was started by Stan, a loyal and generous Acer who seemed to be completely ignored by other acers on THB. We were all dismayed at the slow page loads and the problems with THB, and a few acers left THB and went to TAB. It seemed that the 'most entertaining' people had gone to the new 'official' AOB.com forum for their activities, and the people who attended the reunions remained the loyal THBers. Yet many acers just started going to all 3 forums, and discussions could start and end at any place they happened to meet. There were also many fan clubs that were country (or language specific) that attracted only limited readers.

With the 'scattering' of the acers in 2005, my patience with the community wore thin. I couldn't spend all my time searching 3 forums to keep up with the conversations...and besides my interests had grown beyond AOB music into many international groups and languages. I was reading news in Russian, and researching my new music interests. My interests in posting in forums was in decline; and part of it was that I talked more about myself than taking the time to get to know everyone. It was hard to grasp peoples personality, they came on and acted like americans. They didn't talk about their local traditions, or holidays - the stuff I was most interested in. It became trivial.

Early 2005 (best I can recall) I was going to Virtual DR to read posts from computer users who were having difficulties with their machines. Through my years of experience with IBMs, HPs, Dells, and Compaqs , I had a few answers. But I didn't stay around long enough to gain any friends there.. I did get to read alot about computer software and loads of advice.

By August of 2005, I had a computer problem of my own - my website cleaverb.com went offline. I could log in, and post things to my site, but the site was 'not found' . The host didn't answer my emails, and eventually I found out that his account had been suspended. He didn't answer his emails because the address was wrong. He had changed his email, and never updated the site (he couldn't,he was in suspension). I waited, patiently for cleaverb.com to come back. But it never did. In January, when the hosting bill came due, I paid it and hoped that would solve my problems. It didn't. The domain name was locked, meaning I couldn't renew it until May 2006..so I waited until the domain name became available, and I bought it at www.godaddy.com .. and magically cleaverb.com was back. It was still on the same server, and all my data was still there. Then sometime in June 2006 the website went offline again. The host never answered my emails but I finally traced him to another hosting company, and in November (?) he faithfully restored my service on the new companies equipment. It worked a little slower than before, since the new server was located in England, and not Dallas TX as before. But it worked, and my final straw was when the website went down in May 2007. Using my previous experiences, I first bought a domain name( cleaverb.net) , and then went in search of a host..and I plunked down $80 for 2 years of service with IX Webhosting. I am still with them.

My 'next big thing' (in 2006) was creating a MySpace page. This actually started with acers, who would often link to their blogs and other online activities. But I didn't do much on Myspace then, except for add 'friends' from all over the world. I tried to search out people whom I went to school with and old friends. But i couldn't find anybody. I just decided that nobody had a computer/ was online to have a MySpace account. It was kind of a kids hangout anyway, the most important feature for MySpace was the music . I tried facebook, but since my high school had integrated with another school, I couldn't connect with anyone. Later on, they changed their system and I was 'dumped' into the local NWA network. But I had no friends, and it was't until 2008 until my old buddies started showing up there.

By early 2007 I was still going to THB, just not all-day every-day like in earlier times. There had been arguments, and people who felt 'left out' of the conversations had gone to TAB. At one of the forums, somebody started a YouTube thread, where you posted your user account. I had watched many videos on YouTube, without signing up for an account . Now I created an account.. A day or two after signing up, I got the urge upload something..anything because I was a member. I searched, but could never find videos by the Russian group Total. Which seemed odd, because you could download them right off the bands website. So I uploaded Byot Po Glazam and it was viewed almost 100 times before it got deleted (for copyright infringement). (It was before I realized you could search YouTube in cyrillic, and easily find Total's videos..)

I started to search videos from all my new favorite groups. They were a treasure for my language studies. Then one day after watching a photo show , I got the idea to add photos to some of my favorite songs. I made 5 or 6 slideshows , in about 1 hours time. And uploaded them to YouTube. Within one hour, my Via-Gra - Ne Nado video had nearly 200 views. It was amazing that something I had created, would be watched that much. Then a couple of the others became popular as well. I was getting around 3,000 views a day, for 2007 and into summer 2008. Then mysteriously, the Ne Nado video stopped being watched. (It was blocked by Sony). But my Akros Tolmiro and Ti Ne Zakrivai videos kept going and by Halloween 2008 the cleaverb YouTube channel had 1,000,000 views.

I don't remember the date but one more thing THB encouraged me to do was to get a gmail account. At the time, you had to be invited to get one. I can't remember who, but one of the acers sent me an invitation. I never use gmail much, but Google offers many other services that are worth exploring, such as; analytics for website traffic, RSS feeds (these can be added to My Yahoo pages too), the news is fantastic (many sources), and the ability to add a search to your website are 3 of the most memorable services. One thing about Google news; you can (at the time) select a language other than English, thereby I could practice my language skills. Also the BBC has the ability to switch languages on some stories. If you want stories in Russian, go to the Asian news and click on Russian.

Also mentioned at THB, was the Wayback machine, or the InternetArchive at www.archive.org. This was part of my inspiration for creating Retro-Mania and it also led to my creating several videos for YouTube. You can also find many historical films there, such as landing on the moon or countless live events and shows. You will also find tons of film that have gone beyond copyright, and are now considered public domain property. If you like Betty Boop cartoons, old Lucy shows, or maybe Charlie Chaplin films try searching them on www.archive.org .

Another activity worth mentioning is my time spent at www.reddit.com . Sometime in 2007 I discovered reddit, and i enjoyed the photo pages people would link to: It was fun to see pages of Lego creations, or computer case modifications that people wrote. It was partly my inspiration for my own essays. The stories may not say much, but you give what you have. Or you make it better. I continued to read alot of news stories from reddit through 2009 and into 2010. But the focus of the community changed; their main interest went from posting simple news story links to comments about news stories. Long pages... It just seemed like a complete waste of time to go there any more.

Wikipedia is also worth mentioning. It's fun to search out things there, try top ten stories or weird stories or spooky or whatever. In 2008, someone 'borrowed' my Blestyashchie biography and posted it to wikipedia. I was thrilled - at being published. At the same time, I was apprehensive that possibly i had made errors, So I joined wikipedia and asked the members to research my sources and correct my mistakes. Nothing happened, but later on Blestyashchie added a Bio page to their website.

Through late 2007 and well into 2008, my primary online activity was creating content for cleaverb.net and cleaverb.org. The IX webhosting account gave me 3 gigabits of storage, and I was using about 100megabits. I started with expanding my favorite artists pages, and writing essays about my computers, bicycles, and other things I collected in my lifetime. But I spent a great deal of time 'messing' with the appearance of the pages. We started out with a purple page, then black, then a sold blue design. After that, solid colors got to be pretty boring. I also went back and re-created my earlier pages, for the cleaverb archive. Around the same time, I started uploading songs to share my playlists - lists that I actually create and listen to, and also I uploaded the actual desktop backgrounds that I use on my computer. I only change them 2-3 times per year, so it wasn't much.

We started getting the emails, and the news stories about Geocities closing in early 2009. I did spend a few days searching out content there to keep for our Retro-Mania (now classics) pages. This also led me into watching tons of classic television shows online; stuff like BeWitched (search YouTube), I Love Lucy, Get Smart, Gilligans Island...etc.

In early 2009, after playing Risk online with my buddies, we decided to play a game of Scrabble on www.pogo.com . It was a real nice community and we had a great time mingling with the regulars. I also started playing other games there, word games and dice and card games until I decided to pay for a membership. By now, I had bought 'everything I ever wanted' on eBay, and Pogo was my favorite thing to do now. Morning, afternoon and night I played games there. time flies. But I was still keeping in touch with my Risk buddies, and by July we had started to play Risk on WarZone. We even started a MyLeague , but we just could not get the interest of the old Risk crowd to join us. By November 2009, our MyLeague Risk ladder was deleted. It seems that most of the online Riskers have migrated to other games, although a few play Conquer - a Risk clone game.

In March 2010 Pogo began offering the game Risk on their website. This was the greatest thing to happen with Risk in a long time. My buddies and I attempted to get our Risk friends to come and play, but people had 'moved on' from Risk. It is hard to say how many do play Risk on Pogo, since there could be hundreds of players on at any time. Cases Ladder started a Pogo Risk ladder, yet by July 2010 cleaverb was still the only one signed up. There was nobody to play, so I couldn't get a rank.