What have you been up to of late?
I write sporadically for TheRegister which I try to do around twice a month. It's actually harder than writing once a week because I sort of lose the flow of things. About 2008 I left The University of Waikato where I'd worked for most of my BOFH-writing life and entered the real world.
Can I send you money?
There's nothing wrong with sending me money. Alternatively you could send me some Art-deco letterpress type. You can never have too much of that.
Did you know that most of the html on this website is appalling?
As a matter of fact I did. I'd mirrored the old ntk archive many years ago and the mirroring process inserted tons of extraneous html into the document so I did what I thought was some very quick "1,$ s/x/y/g" commands in vi. I can't even remember how I did it, but it removed a stack of stuff that I didn't really want removed - not the least of which was the close paragraph html. I am ashamed - but then I noticed that most browsers just ignore them anyway because back in the day one didn't close paragraphs. It is nasty and I fully intend to do something about it - just not now.
No, I mean there's page errors
Really? Email me about them on the how not to contact me link on the landing page. I will hopefully fix them.
What happened to all that other stuff that used to be on your website?
Most of that stuff I have just sort of let lie as it was fairly superfluous to me, so you should consider it gone for good. I'm only really trying to keep my BOFH and letterpress stuff online now.
Will you put more years up?
(Edit) Probably not. I thought I would but it turns out that I'll probably never get around to it. Too many other things to do.
You know some of the stuff you wrote is pretty dodgy, right?
Yes. Yes I do. If I were writing now, a lot of the things I wrote about then (bofh and non-bofh) would never be written. They're just not the way
I think any more. And no doubt in 10 years I'll feel the same way about the stuff I'm writing now. As much as we'd like to tell ourselves we're
all civilised now, we came from somewhere and are going somewhere and we have a history, even if we're not aligned with it any more. I'm not a big
fan of cancelling authors for having a style that has dated with time as culture has moved on. I'd rather be honest and say 'Some of us used to
think like that - back then - but we don't think like that now.'
This really is some rubbish html.
Yes. Give me time.