Personal Stuff
About me
They always warn people not to put too much information on the internet, so it has taken me 5 years to get a personal page here. (call me paranoid, procrastinator is more like it). Anyway, a friend of mine, Kat told me I needed a personal page, about me.... so here it is.
There are a lot of "styles" of personal info. pages on the web, I just figure.. I'll put in here what I want people to know ... LOL I was born in Southampton, England in April 1973 at Southampton General Hospital, now part of the Southampton University Hospitals Trust.
I attended first of all St. Christopher's Nursery School, then St.Christopher's School, then at the age of 8, I went to Oakmount School in Highfield, Southampton. (Sadly since closed to make way for a housing development, much to the detriment of the city). I stayed there until 1986, when I briefly attended the Gregg School in Southampton. (The least said about that, the better, suffice to say I wouldn't recommend the school to anyone). After my brief stay there, I attended Embley Park School,in Romsey near Southampton. I stayed there for 4 years, the least happy years of the school's life I believe... LOL (actually looking back it wasn't so bad, but at the time it was the most evil institution known to mankind).
After leaving school, I joined one of the (in) famous training schemes run by the government and was employed by Southampton University in the Estates and Buildings Department until 1992.
At that point I worked for my uncle for a few years as a carpet fitter, but my main interest was still technology, of almost any kind, first satellite television, then telecommunications, and then finally computers (networking in particular). The upshot of all this was, that in 1999 I purchased a shiny new PC... an Intel Pentium™ III 450 MHz beast with 64 whole megabytes of RAM... and an enormous 8.4 Gb hard drive and the almost brand new Microsoft® Windows™ 98
In April 1999, I got "online" and discovered that lots of people had got there before me, and yet they seemed to neither know nor care how their computers actually worked! This to me was a culture shock, but I discovered that many of them DID care about how they worked, they just assumed they were "too complex" or "too difficult" to understand. I can't see that, as I had to ask the salesman how to turn the computer off.... in March 1999, yet by June or July, I was busy customizing the way the system worked. (Maybe it was my previous Experience of MS-Dos 3 that prepared me for a basic understanding, I don't know). So I started to help people out as and where I could, mainly in chatrooms or by email. This got me talking to people, unsurprisingly, and eventually someone took an interest in me for more than just computer help. I was kind of naive, so it took me a while to notice this, but I did, eventually...LOL.
Anyways... the point is, in December 1999, I came to the US on a visit, and then
came back a couple of months later as I hadn't met everyone I had wanted to, and ended up
marrying a friend I had met in chat. We lived fairly
happily for a couple of years in Wisconsin, but unfortunately that fell through,
(sometimes, shit happens), but I met (or re-met) one of the first people I had met in 1999,
in September 2002. We are currently living in
Cambridge, Ohio.
<!-- begin rant block -->
<RANT>
Don't ask me why it has the domain
name http://www.cambridgeoh.org, it's not a
non-profit organization, its address should have been http://www.cambridge.oh.us or
http://www.cambridge.city.oh.us but NOBODY seems to follow the basic rules of the Domain
Name System anymore, organizations that are not part of the network infrastructure have
.net domains, non-profit organizations have .com addresses,
companies registered anywhere in the world think they are MEANT to have .tv addresses,
companies specific to the UK have .com addresses when they should really have .co.uk
subdomains etcetera, etcetera. Things like this seem to be nitpicking to people who see
the internet merely as "another advertising medium".. however, the internet was intended
to be a communications medium, primarily to communicate information. If cities would use
the domain name system PROPERLY it wouldn't be much of a guess to figure out that
if the city is cambridge, the state is ohio, the country is the US, and the department
is the police department, their location MIGHT be police.cambridge.oh.us for example.
About the only organizations actually still FOLLOWING this are some universities, for
example, Southampton University, their departments
are generally accessible at [dept.name].soton.ac.uk.One commercial institution that does
this is Yahoo! who's site is laid out as a network of
subdomains. I am not the only one to feel this way, an EXCELLENT site on this subject, as
well as interesting information and viewpoints on other matters, can be found on
Dan's Site.
<!-- end rant block -->
</RANT>
Okay now for the pictures.... I decided to put them inline in the page as they aren't very
large and by the time you just read all that, they should have loaded
.