When I arrived in Guelph and started on medication, I did nothing for a few years, in a state of shock I guess. Living alone became more than I could bear and I moved into a CMHA (Canadian Mental Health Association) group home for companionship. It was a beautiful historic home that slept 8 people comfortably. There was an old Macintosh in the office and the staff kindly let me write my story on it when they didn't need it. I had dreams of publishing a book. The thing at this group home was to have a "program", something that got you out of the house during the day. I enrolled in a continuing education computer information systems course. The provincial government provides free education to everyone up to Grade 12/13 in Ontario. I learned a little Word Perfect 5.1, DOS 5, and Lotus 123. I was collecting Family Benefits at that time when the people at Family Benefits (provincial government) forced me to apply for Canada Pension Disability (federal government). I was approved for Canada Pension and got a check for $5,000, which was back pay for the years I had been certified as disabled. This money was supposed to be handed over to the Family Benefits people to reimburse them for supporting me those years, but the money was deposited in my bank account and it sat there for several months.
I was going to buy a car, but one of the CMHA relief staff at the house convinced me that a computer was a better "investment". Not that he had one himself. He had just bought a car. When I look back now I realize that his advice changed the course of my life. With that computer I was really able to begin my recovery, submitting proposals, writing resumes, and developing this web site. It was a pivotal turning point in my recovery and I will always be deeply indebted to that man. He wasn't a trained professional. His last job was cleaning carpets.
I bought a Compaq Pressario 425 with 4 Megs of RAM, and a 210 MB hard drive. It was a basic 486 that traveled at a whopping 25 MHz. It had a very slow modem, the speed of which I forget, and once in my own bachelor apartment I figured out how to connect to local bulletin boards. When I saved up some money I invariably spent it upgrading the computer, first to a 14.4 modem, then another 4 Meg of proprietary RAM, and then a new 100 MHz 486 DX4 processor. I sold it after four years to a university student for less than a quarter of the $2,000 original price.
I was on the Internet by then. I came across a display in the local shopping mall, took home a flyer and joined shortly there after. By that time everybody was talking about the Internet and I was really curious. A family member mentioned that a home page of my experiences would be a great public service. I came across some great pages done by kids and I thought one of them might be able to get a badge in boy scouts or something if they did mine. Instead I found "intro to html" web sites. I started just adding html tags by hand using Notepad, then used a freeware version of Homesite and finally bought a copy of Homesite 3 and then 4, 4.5, and now 5 although I don't use many of the features. Dreamweaver comes highly recommended if you have the desire to design interesting web sites.
At first no one visited my site, but someone mentioned submit-it.com and I started asking other sites about schizophrenia to list my site and then Yahoo e-mailed me that they were going to list my site on their subject tree. The number of visitors jumped from 10 a day to 50 a day. I started to have to pay for traffic and asked Eli Lilly if they would like to sponsor a worthy cause and they gave me $500. I bought a Pentium 166 MMX. A year and a half later, I bought a custom built Pentium II 350 MMX which was a very nice computer. I upgraded a little and then started building my own systems. My father bought me a 19 inch Sony G400 which was an excellent monitor. The G500 I bought on eBay is a nice size, but I would never recommend buying a monitor, sight unseen on eBay. I've built about six systems from left over parts, which I've sold to nonprofit organizations in the mental health business. I wish I could say my web design skills were improving but they're not. I'm not even tempted to become a better code writer. It's like playing chess where the computer usually wins and you lose. I don't have the necessary brain power.
The traffic to my site is anywhere from 100 to 600 visitors a day, about 4,000 a month during the school year usually. It really went up a lot higher after "A Beautiful Mind" won so many Oscars, but has come back down and settled at 4,000 a month. If you click on my counter you can see the stats yourself. I update it when I have time, add new pages, check the links. Iteats up a surprising amount of my time so I'm pleased it's been quite successful. Eli Lilly was giving me $2,000 every couple of years when I asked for it. They never ask questions or ask for any favours related to this site. Now that I have more financial resources I'm paying for everything myself out of pocket. All of the content of this site was written and rewritten by me alone, without any help from anyone really. No one previews any material I upload to this site, which got me into a whole lot of trouble when I read an extremely disturbing Windsor Star supplement on Schizophrenia. You can never win trying to tear down something. It's too negative. An us and them philosophy will only lead to a constant revenge mentality, like the Palestinian and Israeli conflict.
Probably the only employment skill I acquired as I was developing schizophrenia in university was writing. I had to write so many papers and reports during 6 years of university, before I was kicked out. I can't read, but I can write.
I decided on chovil.com instead of konarak.com. Konarak is an obscure Indian Temple which was my idea of paradise when I was delusional. I paid for the domain name out of my own money. Because Konarak is still a symbol for me of a better world, I decided to leave that domain name for someone else to develop. It would have been difficult to explain Konarak, one of few quite erotic temples missed by the muslims, who destroyed every one they could find as they invaded India, to an essentially Christian audience.
What is schizophrenia? | | My story | | Condensed story | | Recovery | | Prodrome | | Medication | | Compliance Early Intervention | | Relapse prevention | | Cognition | | Housing and benefits | | Meaningful activity | | Family and social support | | ACT Teams | | Movies, books | | Web sites | | Poster | | Origins of this site | | Persistent delusions | | Photo of me | | My addictions | | First graph | | Guest book 2004 | |