[Continued from opening paragraph on home page...]

I'm not the same Daniel Tobias who was drafted as a pitcher by the Pittsburgh Pirates, and I'm not the Dan Tobias who's the coach of the Washington State University women's soccer team. And I'm certainly not the Daniel Tobias who died in 1809 and whose descendants are charted on a genealogical Web site.

I work for an investment newsletter publisher, developing CGI scripts, database structures, and other technology behind the Web sites for their various publications. Before that, I used to work for Softdisk, an Internet provider in Louisiana. Softdisk was formerly in the subscription software business (1981-1999), and I was involved in that too back then.

However, this page is not an official company project (of any of my employers, past or present). This home page is my own. Its content is entirely controlled by me... with no boss to wander in, look at some piece of it out of context and say "it sucks," and force me to change it; and no marketing consultant dweebs dragged in to nitpick it and alter its entire concept to ensure it targets the proper demographics. So, if you go to this page one day and find it's been totally messed around with compared to how it was before, you can blame this on my own flighty capriciousness, not any flighty capriciousness imposed on the site by an outside boss or marketing committee.

(An aside about my new home state of Florida: I remembered from visits here back in the '70s that the U.S. highway signs were color-coded; for instance, US 1 was red, US 441 was brown, etc. But when I arrived here in 2000, they were all in boring black-and-white just like in other states, except for a few fading older signs here and there. I wondered what made them change, then found on this Web site that the Federal Highway Administration had bullied the state into adopting the duller signs. Apparently, the multicolored signs violate current Federal standards for highway markers, though Florida used them from 1956 to 1993. And, like usual for the Feds, they brought the state in line by threatening to withhold highway funds unless they caved in, just like they did in other matters like drinking ages, speed limits, and seatbelt laws. I think the Federal bureaucrats have way too much power. And I think the multicolored highway signs were a neat idea which made Florida's highways distinctive. Too bad it got squelched by the paper-pushers in Washington.)

A while back I took up chess as a hobby; you can see my USCF rating status online. (Not very great, actually... though I like to pride myself on the ability to think logically and to think a few moves ahead, I'm still a bit deficient in specific knowledge of chess strategy, and also tend to do impulsive, foolish things on occasion.)

Those of you who use modems to call stuff other than the Internet used to be able to call my BBS, Dan's Den, online since April 25, 1989, but they can't any more since I finally shut it down on April 25, 1999, exactly ten years after it started.

I received this e-mail, presumably in response to one of my web pages (the writer neglected to indicate exactly which one):

From:           	artemismoon1@webtv.net (candice tatum)
Date sent:      	Sun, 12 Jul 1998 18:49:15 -0500 (CDT)

please stop trying to force your ignorance on our children!!!!!

This suggests a possibility for a new slogan for my web site:

Dan's Home Page: Forcing my Ignorance on Your Children Since 1995!

But that's not the weirdest feedback I've received... recently somebody commented anonymously:

Your web page was not very helpful in our report for finding
information on federal highway funds.

...as opposed, I guess, to the millions of other personal home pages that are highly helpful for this???

About This Site (What does that .name address mean, anyway?)