I first landed on the internet in the mid-1980s. I forget the exact year. I posted under my real name. Everyone did. The net was a small, chummy place, and real names were taken as both a credential and a surety. Many signatures further included employer, address and phone number.

Then came the Endless September, and the mongol hordes of AOL. And that, of course, was just the beginning of the growth of the net. My newsgroup habits slid down and down, from computers and games and local news to vicious international political slap-fests. I discovered I have a hidden talent: I can piss people off. I mean, really piss them off. Reduce them to bubbling, frothy puddles of inchoate rage. And I enjoyed it. All these years later, and I'm betting there are still a few who would like to reach out and touch me.

I'm not ashamed. They don't call me "weasel" for my jaunty whiskers and glossy brown pelt.

I did, however, put myself in the Troll Protection Program. There were so many attempts to climb up my IP or data mine my old posts, I became scrupulously paranoid in my posting habits. I come to paranoia with graceful ease, too.

When I started a personal site, it made me nervous as a cat. (One of those very nervous cats, obviously. The skinny, whiny ones that upchuck Friskies on the stairs just before you come down for coffee in the morning). The wealth of particular and personal information I'm blurting out here is a terror unto an weasel. You could probably rub together any number of choice pieces of data here and Google up my name.

Of course, the net is a vastly bigger place these days, stuffed full of blogs and photo albums and MySpace pages; useless slabs of solipsistic HTML, written by millions and read by no-one. Umpteen ASCII trees falling silently in netnode forests every day. I'm surely safe hunkered down in here.

Still, as the nose-picking geeks say, there is no security through obscurity. And the net is full of roving nutters.

So if you're thinking of dropping by, remember: I'm heavily armed, I hate unexpected visitors and I just threw up my Friskies on the stairs.