Othersna edit:  At TPS the first post by new members is an Introduction post. This is an outstanding introduction posted by a new member, Ocean,  a few months ago, and forwarded to me for blog submission by Castagnety.

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Well, how do I do that now, my dear? I am not a native english speaker. I don’t know how to talk like a pirate like some awesome members here (truly, because I don’t even know what ‘ahoy’ means for crying out loud). And last but not least, back in high school, my grade in literature barely passed the average note.

Besides, I myself am not outstanding either. In life, I’m a normal person, an average guy. Online, I’m not an IT guru, or some awesome hacker like geohot for example. I’m just a guy in front of my laptop, surfing things, googling stuffs, and yes, torrenting too.

It all started out almost 15 years ago, the day I had my first computer as a reward for being able to get into a good high school (well only good, not the best) all by myself. And there I was, starting my days of file sharing. Well, back in 1996, stuffs like CD-ROM were too luxurious, I had to be content with some 1,44M Floppy to exchange some Dos games with my classmates. Games like Aladdin, Lionking are still vivid on my mind. For a game less than 1.44M, the video quality was pretty darn good in compare to huge games today which requires Gigas of HDD and RAM as well. Back then, we shared not only games but programs too of course. I remember stuffing dozens of Floppy disks into boxes to go get a version of MS Office and Windows 3.1.
A few years passed, there go the day I got to upgrade my PC with a CD-ROM Drive and with that my system changed its life to something more graphical we call Windows 95. Life was easier from that day on as I got to get rid of bunches of fragile 1.44M disks.

However it was not until 2000 that I could get my hand on the thing we all call Internet. Before that, I only read about that in papers and how it is rapidly growing and it will change our life, etc… Unfortunately, it was not as fast as I imagined. On a dial-up 28.8 or 56Kbps line, your life can not change very fast, my friend. Sometimes, in my 3h online at night, almost half of it was waiting to get connected and frustrating for being disconnected. Nevertheless, during the surfing and suffering, I heard of a guy whose name is Napster. People told one to another how awesome he was to create something that helped him share his homework or some other stuff in his computer to his friends apparently on the other end of the world (otherwise, who would wait on a dial-up connection to get something instead of getting out of his chair and run to his mate’s house to get the stuffs?). However, that’s beside the point. The point is, he made something that helped him give something to someone in any place that had a computer and a dial-up connection (to save server disk space for a better environment, I will call it internet hereafters). After that day, not only his homework was shared through internet to his friends, but also a song he liked, a game he found cool, etc… So… despite slow internet, I jumped on this boat immediately, and there the world was mine. Songs I’d never get a chance to listen to otherwise, things I thought I’d never have a chance to watch it again. They were all there, waiting for me. From here, I started to have a slightest idea what P2P is.

However, all that sharing stuffs I mentioned were just a small part of what I’ve acquired since the day I have a PC. Getting to know what a computer is and every part of it is very interesting for a guy like me (who unfortunately never ended up making money out of it anyways). Had Linux been available to me that day instead of Windows, my life would have been much better. Simply because I stuffed into my head everything ppl talked about windows and how to survive it, how to endure it…
Most importantly, the internet paved my way to a place where I can share things which I’d be much more hesitant in real life, a community of anonymous people. There I can talk about everything; I can open up myself without feeling shy. The Internet became a training school where I can practice myself how to talk to people, how to react to their behaviours… I joined a local community where I read tons of interesting discussions about things in life, where I realized there are a lot of people who want to share the same thing as I do. I got to meet a lot of nice people. We organized occasional meetings which we called “offline”. It’s a very interesting feeling when you meet for the first time people that you’ve known for a while. Confusion over whether we should call that person by his real name or his nickname, Surprise over the look of certain persons when it did not look like we imagined… One cool thing was that every time after we had gone to “offline”, we talked about it again when we’re back online. There were comments, muses, ideas… some of them we could even have said during “offline” but we did not . Well… that’s what an online community about, and that intrigues me since then.

Time passed, things changed, it was fun while it lasted, we moved on… but the Internet is still there, growing, expanding to every single cell of our lives.
I moved abroad it so it only made sense that my reach to the online community should be more internationally. One obstacle though, the language. However, language was just a minor issue. Difference in culture; difference in living style; and in thinking… those were the hard part to fit in. Although the internet has a very large resource to make it up to you, it does not seem enough, especially when you’re into something that’s not your specialty.

Of course, when we are at this timeline, Napster was history, even Kazaa or the like of it. A new power must have risen of course. And so I heard of something called Bit torrent. To be honest, my first experience was not the best. I could not download a single byte for days and had no clue how to fix it. So I gave up and went to something more user-friendly and what could be friendlier than some kind of animal like a donkey or a mule? However, terrified by the infection of viruses over P2P, and downloading had never been my main interest, I dropped it there. I made my return to file sharing right on time when torrenting started to mature or probably because I was more prepared to get to know more about it. Well… how I could not know when people talk about it more than once to my ears to make me realize I might miss out something there if I skipped it. So I crawled from one place to another, grabbing every little bit of what bit torrent is. From public trackers, to semi-private one, then higher and higher. I think I should mention many good souls, who have helped me to get to where I want to, but I don’t want to ruin their discretion without asking them first.

Nevertheless, those were only small stops along the road as I haven’t found a place where I can settle. There was one that good, but not so friendly to be with. One that was great and kind of friendly but they were at too high of a level for me to be able communicate without feeling bad about myself…

Out of nowhere, a sudden need of research brought me here. Not sure of what I was searching, so I looked. Certain articles of the blog interested me, one impressed me, inspired me get to know more about you, about this community. A lot of things in the blog entry I’ve read make me feel like I could be myself in this community like many of you have been. So I hope this place could be the one where I can stay and share a part of my ordinary life with.

I don’t know the pirate way or the outstanding way to say it but I’d like to say that I’m glad to be on board with you