I think it is crucial to identify such turning points in one's life to better understand where one is (or should be) heading. An idea by @Vesuvius, who studies etymology, is that the mess one creates is a message to oneself for finding the right direction.
I've made a plot of my most important decisions like they did in the World Decision Map in Adjustment Bureau. If you haven't seen the movie, every 90° turn on the map is a decision in life and there are people who control the decisions of all people on the planet. Sometimes, due to the unpredictable nature of people, everything doesn't go along the plan an in come the Adjusters, a special force brigade that make you take the right decision without you even noticing. So such a map is quite cool to make yourself and see how it intertwines with the lives of others :)
What is the state of Esperanto on the internet today, has it changed from the time you mention?
I am one of the later generation of internet learners, and I came to an online world full of options to learn Esperanto. I have looked into Interlingua before by then, and there was basically nothing at all at that point to learn Interlingua with... I am pretty sure that's different right now, but then the massive amount of options for Esperanto was quite a big help for me to make the step!
So I have to really thank to people like Oleg for that, a brilliant guy who I had then the pleasure to meet in my very first Esperanto meeting abroad in Germany.
Oh, thank you for asking! Yes, very much so! When I learnt Esperanto via email correspondence course, I was the very first person in Russia to have learnt the language on the Internet. Today it would be quite unusual to not learn Esperanto online. When lernu.net came out (by the way, one of the outcomes of that first seminar in Uppsala), many thousands of people around the world, especially the young ones, got access to a high-quality free Esperanto learning resource. Other online services using Esperanto have improved drastically as well, like Wikipedia in Esperanto. And when DuoLingo had featured Esperanto, the new huge wave of adoption arrived.
Right now Esperanto is experiencing a Renaissance of sort – all thanks to the power of the Internet. Even Monero (XMR) owes its name to Esperanto. ;)