> I was just curious to know what it was that inspired you to create RinkWorks in the first place.

It's not really a decision that came together all at once. I majored in computer science, and while at school I spent a vast number of hours online, reading and posting to Usenet newsgroups and downloading stuff from FTP sites. This goes back as early as 1991, before the web existed. When the web boomed into the technical community, it was really only a matter of time before I had some kind of presence on the web, because that's just in my nature. In school, I had a public area in my UNIX account with assorted humor files. I don't know if anybody ever actually poked around in there, but the idea was that people *could*. I've had a drive to entertain people in me since as far back as I can remember. The common denominator in every hobby I've ever been interested in is entertainment.

But it was a while before I had an idea that motivated me to actually start a web project. That would be At-A-Glance Film Reviews, which started out as a team project: me and my two cube-mates at work. We liked to debate movies, and we started scrawling these one line movie reviews on our white board as a "movie review of the day" sort of thing. The idea of migrating this to the web cropped up, and I ended up putting some web pages together and doing that. Eventually the other two guys lost interest, and after all these years (it was 1996 when it started), now it's just me, and the reviews aren't really "at-a-glance" length reviews anymore.

At any rate, a year and a half went by, and then Dave and I had another idea for a web project. That was Book-A-Minute. Before that was ready to open up to the public, I was thinking, well, hey, we should have a brand name to tie these two things together, along with anything other web projects that crop up. So I did. And I think the very *idea* of *having* a brand name for entertainment-related sites was what spurred me into developing more. The features came quickly after that.

Anyway, the reasons I started this are slightly different for the reasons I continue. Both have roots in the basic fact that I have the drive in me to seek audiences to entertain. Both have roots in the fact that RinkWorks is such a great medium to channel my creative energies into. But in the beginning I certainly had no idea where it would lead. I never expected to get such an *audience*, and *really* never expected to find life-long friendships and a lasting community.

Hope that helps. I don't know if that answers your question in the way you were looking for, but you can ask me more specific questions if you're still curious about anything.