The site was started innocently enough in 1998 as shuweb.com to experiment with creating a website and staking a claim on one small corner of the web. I was a proud parent of a cardigan corgi mix – I featured him on my website. Back then, creating a website was complicated, time consuming and very slow. Plus, digital cameras were bulky and resolution was terrible. I resorted to scanning photos, which required cropping, resizing, etc. As a result, many of the photos were small and in low resolution.
My dog passed away in late 2006 at the old age of 14, but by this time, I had expanded to putting up all the vacation photos since 1992. Although I have been to other countries prior to 1992, I decided against putting them up, mainly because those vacations were with family vacations, i.e, parents.
For a while (i.e., pre-kids) my wife and I were going on one or two tropical vacations per year. I shared our photos with the world and in return met many people over the internet who were either inspired by our vacations or wanted to give us ideas about our next great trip. I had fun creating the pages which spanned several page per vacation.
But soon, sites like Tripadvisor took over the role of sharing vacation experiences, and social media like Facebook made personal travel websites obsolete. I would have loved to have created my own travel guide, but that requires frequent travel and lots of money, and frankly Samantha Brown and the rest of the Travel Channel do a lot better job at it. So in mid 2010, I scaled down the older vacations to just thumbnails.
One more thing – for a time, there was (and still is) someone whose internet handle name is EXACTLY the same as my real name. I e-mailed him once, and it turned out at the time that he was a boy (now an adult) who lived in the east coast. He combined the first name of his favorite manga author with the last name of his favorite manga character, and it was all just a coincidence. But please keep this in mind – I don’t use my name in internet discussion forums, etc. If you see my name on discussion boards, it's not me.
