Who's Sham? Why ShamWerks?

Sham :

My real first name is Jean-Michel (but everybody calls me "Jim"... except the Tax Office though!), I'm aged 49 years, 8 month, 14 days, 15 hours and 44 minutes while you're reading it (accurate, isn't it?). I live on the French Riviera, in southern France.

"Sham" is a nickname I created on my own around 1989 to sign my drawings, doodles, graffitis, etc...
Sham is the short for "Shaman", and it sounded like "Sham-One". Anyway, my friends at the university started calling me Sham, and after it kept on during my jobs... There was a time when a lot of people didn't even know my real first name!

Edit 2021 : The succession is assured!

ShamWerks :

ShamWerks is the 4^th version of my site.
"Werks", in German, means "Work", or "Factory" ; the VolkswagenWerk, for example, is the VW factory...
As this site presents my works, in different domains, and as my favorite mechanics are German... ShamWerks is Sham's Workshop Journal!

I know this site looks like a blog, but I prefer quality to quantity : I'd rather provide an original, useful, homemade content.

Technically, I'm coding this site by hand on a PHP/MySQL platform I have developped ; maybe one day I'll migrate over to WordPress.

History :

Let's do some online archeology :

1996

My first steps on the Web occur in '96 with a site named "Good Morning Net'naaaaam", hosted by Geocities... Which disappeared a long time ago, which is all but a big loss, believe me. (Edit 2016-05-23 : Actually there's still a trace of it at Archive.org!)

1998

1998, I give birth to "Da Sham's Webpage", the v1.0 being hosted at Citeweb (hosting site now disappeared), until late 1999 :

January 1^st 2001

The v2.0 appears on a new hosting site ; Free (God bless the freebox) :

Juin 2003

The v.3.0 will appear in June 2003, dropping the framed design, but still hosted at the same place :

2006

10 years after my first appearance online (er... I'm getting old!), here is the v4.0, and to celebrate this event, it even has it's own domain name : welcome on ShamWerks.com! I offer my site a real hosting space, moving to OVH...

Gosh... 28 years online as you're reading this, this blog is now officially an Internet Dinosaur!

This site is guaranteed 100% "LOL-free":

I'm getting tired of all those sites/blogs/social networks with spelling errors on every single word, plus some more SMS acronyms , "LOL"s and other teenage nerds stuff... In 2000 ago, "LOL" may have been cool ; today, it's just bothering me... On top of that, people not only use it in a written form any more, then also use it in conversations. My ears are too old for that sh*t.

So! ShamWerks is proud to be the first member of the A.L.P.D. : the Anti-LOL Police Department! No more LOLs!

Edit 2016-06-24 : since I wrote this article, not only LOL became a common term in daily conversations, but it even made it officially into the French and English dictionaries.
I have no words. Keep fighting against the LOLz!