Welcome to my home on the Web. If you are here for the first time or by accident, the name's above. For some 30 years, I was a newspaper and magazine reporter and editor — covering music, books, computers and culture, mostly. I still maintain my Reading Library, with new entries to the right. And I also still write the occasional CD review or musician interview – also to the right.

This Web site began life in 1997 as a souped-up version of my bookmarks file so I could access my bookmarks from anywhere – and also learn a little HTML. At the time, I had a guide to San Diego web sites and a guide to science web sites – with early search engines / Web directories Lycos and Yahoo unable to adequately catalogue the Web, sites like mine were useful 18 years ago.

Today, with Google able to find nearly anything online, I've taken those pages down. What you will find here now is an archive of my reviews and columns.

If you're looking for information on the Trageser family, my dad's Trageser Origins & Ancestry page is far more complete than anything I've contemplated. From my old and now dead Geocities page, I did move the Misspelled Trageser List page over here, and the Tribute to Brother Joe Trageser to my dad's site.

For many years, I wrote a beginner's column about finding your way around the online world — first in ComputorEdge magazine where I wrote the Online San Diego column, then for two years for SignOn San Diego, where I wrote the Lost In Cyberspace column (carried nationally by Copley News Service as Net Sitings), and then back in ComputorEdge with the renamed Hot on the Web.

On the (supposedly) humorous side, I've found some of my old Top 10 lists I submitted to the New York Times News Service when David Letterman was on hiatus between networks (back in '93). They published three of them, turning down only my Top 10 Reasons Marge Schott Should Sell the Reds (which they found a little too edgy, I think – but if I find a copy of it, I'll post). Anyway, you can check out my Top 10 Ways Things Would Be Different if Pat Robertson Were President, Top 10 Reasons Tom Werner Should Sell the Padres and Top 10 Reasons California Should Secede From the Union.

Also, the news desk at SignOn San Diego (where I worked until June 2000) compiled a list of News Leads From Hell – newspaper or television reports you just know are going downhill after only a few words: "A Philippines ferry crowded with holiday revelers ..." That sort of thing. (Can you tell that working in the news gives one a gallows humor?)

Finally, when we were at work reading the national and international news on the wire, seeing all the depressing stories from around the world, we started other lists as well just to anesthesize ourselves from the horrors we have to read at work. For instance, we noticed that some datelines (the city from which the reporter filed the story) seemed to portend disaster more than others. Oklahoma City, for instance, with its penchant for tornadoes and weirdos – so we started a Datelines From Hell list. On the text feed of news stories from the various syndicates (Associated Press, Reuters, New York Times News Service), each story has what's known as a "slug," which is a one- or two-word title that allows you to do searches, sort stories, etc. Being short, they have to be creative to be descriptive. So we also did a Sluglines From Hell list as well.

One of my favorite sites of all is the The Nearby C@fe. A.D. Coleman, a well-regarded critic of the photographic arts, runs this online coffee shop and writing salon.

Questions, suggestions or complaints — e-mail me.

Last updated whenever the heck I felt like it.