I was SO honored when asked by Dear B to write an article for her page, so, here's a bit about me and my life after WebTV.

My name is Ron and I am a retired hairstylist of 29 years. I was born 51 years ago in Trenton, Missouri, and lived most of my life in Fulton, a small town in the central part of the state.

I moved to California in 1972 and lived here for about 14 months, then I moved back to Missouri in 1973. I finally moved back to California in 1982 and settled in Long Beach, California. I now call this home. I live in a nice apartment two blocks from the beach with my two cats, Pootsa and Kitty2.

In December of 1997, I was surfing through the TV channels one night and caught the last few minutes of an infomercial. I pretty much HATE infomercials, but...this one was different. It was advertising the wonders of owning a WebTV. I was interested to say the least!

In late December, I went looking for a WebTV unit and because of the Christmas season, everyone was sold out. Just my luck! So, I waited until January and found a newly-released Mitsubishi Plus model in a local store and promptly bought it.

Because I live two blocks from the beach, I wanted a nick that would reflect that, so I came up with my username of "atthebeach." This would also become the name of my first homepage. And the rest, as they say, is history.

After learning basic html in my signature box as everyone does, I just knew I HAD to have a homepage! So I signed up for my first one at GeoCities. Little did I know that I would eventually have five homepages!

A friend then helped me with setting up the basic page and introduced me to the StarBlvd Transloader. He explained that by transloading the files I wanted on my page, I would not be stealing bandwidth and they would always be there at my disposal. So...my personal homepage, At The Beach, became a reality.

I originally wanted my homepage to just be a simple page of personal information, along with my bio, some pictures and HIV/AIDS information. After I was diagnosed with AIDS in September 1995, I wanted to help educate everyone about this dreaded disease. Health-wise, I am doing very well with the help of the wonderful new medicines that are now available for treating AIDS.

Because of the wealth of information my two HIV/AIDS pages contain, many people have linked to them from their pages. They say I have the most comprehensive HIV/AIDS info page. I considered my page a success because of this, but little did I realize my page would just keep growing and growing!

At The Beach started out very small and simple but has continued to grow from three pages into one currently containing 53. My page contains an extensive bio, pictures, my HIV/AIDS info pages, gay and lesbian information, games and puzzles, recipes, California and Long Beach area info plus other fun and interesting pages. One page, Ron's Transloader 411, is one of my most visited individual pages.

Ron's Transloader 411 has helped many newbies learn to transload and made me a well-known person in the WebTV Community. At The Beach has been honored with many awards and was also the very first recipient of the ADH Homepage Helpers Homepage Of The Month Award presented in August 1998.

Many of my visitors always wondered where my beach graphics came from and always asked to use them. This inspired me to start a new page, Ron's Beach House. It is a large page of beach-related graphics and midis for anyone to use on their pages. Ron's Beach House was also honored in August 1999 with the ADD Homepage Helpers Homepage Of The Month Award.

My third page, The WebTV Awards Archives, is a listing of homepage awards. These are awards offered to homepages by and for WebTVers. This has proven to be a very successful page also. The WebTV Awards Archives currently contains over 200 awards that can be applied for, or you can submit the awards that you offer to other homepages.

Recently, I assumed the ownership of two graphics pages, Tigereyes Graphics I and its sister page, Tigereyes Graphics II. Both of these pages are chock-full with a large variety of gifs, graphics and backgrounds for WebTVers to use on their homepages.

During my homepage building process, I have made lots of friends from the various newsgroups that I post in. I am a regular in the alt.discuss.homepage group and a member of ADH Homepage Helpers. I also frequent alt.discuss.webtv.html and alt.discuss.homepage.opinions. I am always just an e-mail away and willing to help and share ideas with other homepage builders.

So, as you can see, I am a pretty busy guy with my five homepages and I am on-line everyday, all day! My WebTV has become the best hobby/obsession that I have ever had. Life is good!