I can’t remember exactly first day I clicked the keyboard keys, but I was about seven years old. And I believe it was a spectrum ZX, and the keyboards were all gummy, so there wasn’t actually any clicking. My father showed me how to make a program which writes whatever I want on the screen over and over. It was something like

10 PRINT “GABRIJELA”
20 GOTO 10
RUN

At age 7

I remember playing with that programming knowledge for a few weeks, finding quotations in books that I liked and then forcing the computer to repeat them over and over again…

If we jump seven years forward, you will find me in a music shop which rents CDs (at the beginning of a CD era, until the it became illegal), and I’m suggesting to the owner that I make and print him catalogue of his CDs for some small sum (which I’ll use to rent more CDs in his store, but hey, I’m making my first money here, so let me enjoy this for a moment). I can still remember how this guy in his mid-30s and his friend couldn’t figure out how I managed to change the spacing between rows and print such a nice grid in the catalogue. I told them that I wasn’t using ‘word’ but ‘excel’, but they didn’t understand me, and I felt oh-so-clever entering puberty…

And another seven years later, God invented e-mail. And with it, the possibility to sit in the faculty lobby in the middle of the night for hours and chat with your loved one for free. And a year later I sat and learned, using online manuals, some html tags and made my first yellow e-zine which was about jealousy. Remember that love I mentioned two sentences ago? Well, he was jealous, and I hated it and tried to communicate about it on the Web. But it made him even more jealous, so it was him or the World Wide. There really wasn’t any choice.

"I am not a human, I am a cloud in trousers", at age 27

So I started writing an online diary, and then came some more articulate and critical texts which were followed by my new web friends and a whole new world of possibilities.

For the last seven years, I have been constantly upgrading my computer, software, webs, and most importantly, myself. So now it is the time for a next level. A time for making a bigger impact.

Gabrijela Ivanov (28:)
Lake Ohrid, Macedonia, February 13th, 2005