Quick intro: Our 10 year anniversary is coming up, and I would like to do some writing to share my life story, the early years of acdb, the struggle to today, and the path forward


History of Anime Characters Database
Chapter 1: History of Rei


Born September 24, 1986 to two loving, supportive parents in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

My childhood was in a word, ordinary. My first friendship was formed in kindergarten. I had a babysitter who lived across the street. She taught me manners like saying ‘Please’ and ‘Thank You’. Her grandchild was like a brother to me. My mother was over protective and took joy in spoiling me. I logged more miles in the sky as a child than most adults. Partly due to having family 2000 miles away to the East, West and South. Also spent a lot of time on the road, making family trips to various towns and cities. My dad enjoyed playing in tournaments, and each summer we would travel to various golf and bowling tournaments. Scholastically, I was not very impressive. While I would hope for many A’s, my report cards were often a mix of C’s and B’s with an occasional A when the teacher liked me. I always got what I wanted for Christmas, and my birthdays were major events. I had great respect for my mothers family, always addressing them by title as I weaseled my way into their wallets. My dads family was excommunicated and not a significant part of my growing up. I lived in a modest 1500 square foot bungalow with 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, basement, living room, family room, dining room, kitchen and 3 storage rooms. Completed by a fenced backyard and a border collie.

My first computer was an Apple Performa 5200, acquired in 1995. It set my mom back about $5000. The computer that changed my life would be the Blue and White Power Mac G3 I bought on a trip to Vancouver in 1999. Shortly after bringing that home, we got our first cable modem. My cousin around this time introduced me to a software called Hotline. Besides being used for chat, it also had quite a file sharing community. I discovered Warez and Anime !

The first animes I watched were 20kbps and 50kbps Real Player files. ASF files existed at this time as well, and were rightfully mocked as ‘a shitty format’. You can’t even find files with quality this bad on the lowest quality streaming sites today! After watching 291 episodes of Dragon Ball Z, I had lost quite a bit of my vision. My mom took me to get my eyes tested, and I discovered to my horror I needed glasses! While I resisted them greatly at first, they became a necessary and welcome part of me. I was in middle school at this time. My collection of anime grew and grew, and I was beginning to take an interest in being a server administrator. In this era, most games came with a thing called a ‘dedicated server’. This is a piece of software anyone can run to allow people around the world to connect to their server and play the same game with everyone connected. I had a lot of fun running Unreal Tournament servers. But even more impressive was Hotline Server. I created my own server, named after my favorite anime at the time: Kenshin’s Ultimate Anime Server. Having a cable modem, I was able to upload and download at what was considered fast speeds at the time. I’d fill my hard drive with 5GB of anime downloads over night, and burn it all to CD the following day. Repeated this process for years eventually filling over 300 CD’s with 10,000 episodes of anime. Around this time I realized what an ‘addictive personality’ meant.

Middle school was also a rather eventful time. My first year was in a regular class and it was quite horrifying. My home room had like a mob boss, a rebel, and a psycho. Compared to elementary school where the principal was my cousin, I lacked a power backer here. My friends from elementary school had colluded to enter a preppy programed called ACE. You had to be on the honor roll to enter ( grade average of 80% or better ), and it stood for Advanced Curriculum Education. My mom pulled some strings and I found myself in ACE with my friends the following year. The girls were beautiful! So many long haired blondes! I also joined an elite choir that met afternoons called Project. 30 girls and 3 guys. While I had no talent for singing, I had no problem joining the choir my best friend was in. We once traveled with this choir to Minneapolis and took home Gold. We really were the best. There was also a computer class in middle school, where I learned my first bit of HTML 3.

I was quite a Mac addict at this time. Joining AOL chatrooms to troll “PC SUCKS!!!! BILL GATES IS THE ANTI CHRIST!!! MACS RULE!!!!” and all that. How else is a middle school kid to spend their evenings? Well, it just so happened in ACE I met Victor. Like me, he grew up having a computer, but his was a PC. Yes, we were destined to be enemies. I would harass and bully him every chance I got. Frequently stealing his pencil case only to be beaten half to death by his kleenex box each and every time.

When I got to high school, that all changed. Final Fantasy XI was coming, and I needed a PC to play it! The only person I knew who could help me was Victor. And for whatever reason, he agreed to help build me a PC to play Final Fantasy XI. Spending my mothers money, we quickly reached a shopping list of $2000 worth of components. Bleeding edge mother board, bleeding edge GPU, bleeding edge CPU and enough RAM, HD, case and PSU to get the job done. Yes, I had a 2.8GHz dual core in 2001. Thus began a great friendship, and many laughs about technology were shared between us for years.

To be continued ....

[ Edited Mar 29, 2017 ]

私は日本語を少し読むと書くをできます。あなたも？