I became interested in the Internet in the mid-1990s. I had a 486 PS/2 PC that was slow even for the times and AOL 1.5 that offered Gopher, WWW, and WAIS on startup. By 1996 I was involved to the degree that I designed my first Website for a friend's father (thanks, John) and registered this domain name for myself.

It did not take any particular prescience to know that the Web was going to open up a new age for communication and that's what inspired the name. Since that time, the Web has been a hobby, an education, part of a career, a bit of
a business, a welcome creative outlet,
a source of entertainment, and a vast, sometimes accurate reference library.

I have been influenced by the work of Joseph Campbell and a page about the hero's journey on this site gets some traffic. One of his ideas was that the pictures of the earth taken from the moon should serve to dissolve our old way of thinking about nationalism, religion, and our place in the universe. In The Power of Myth he said,

"When you see the earth from the moon, you don't see any divisions there of nations or states. This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come. That is the country that we are going to be celebrating. And those are the people that we are one with."

Since the beginning, I've carried this image—the earth as seen from the moon—along with the site's many versions.

I've debated (with myself) about including more personal details but my space is not MySpace. This is strictly a personal Website that follows my personal interests and opinions and gives me a chance to express myself. But, my name is Dave Troland and I live with wife and son in suburban Chicago.

Worldchanges is also a way to maintain an e-mail address over time by maintaining a domain myself, avoiding Prodigy --> Yahoo! --> SBC --> AT&T e-mail address changes.

Somewhere along the line I tried setting up an Amazon affiliate store and I occasionally play with that. My 2008 incarnation (reincarnation?) of this site builds up that area. I started a large project of Jazz Biographies and Bibliographies but know that other people have done it better, so I merged it in with the Amazon store. For fun, I do a little writing, mostly essays, and I'm filling out that area. I'm also going to try a blog to get my rant on. Finally, a little information that relates to some development and design I've done.

And that is what this site is about. Thank you for visiting.