Welcome to my page!

Welcome to my little corner of cyberspace!
(This is only my second real attempt at a web page and it's very slow, so please be patient with me!)

This picture was snapped poolside in Lahaina Town, Maui, Hawai'i by my daughter LoriAnn.

This page is best viewed at 800x600. Please be patient of the music as well, for it sometimes takes longer to load than I am personally comfortable with!

Hello everyone and welcome back! This site was last funkodelified on 09/12/2003 and was constructed with Netscape Composer v4.78, CuteHTML LE and should be viewed equally well under any browser!

Browser specific pages suck. Agree with me? Click on this graphic and let everyone know!

    Anyhow... the time has come, the walrus said... for a solilequy! Don't worry, I'm just going to tell you about the days of yore and how I got into the world of computers and digital communications a good long while before John Q. Public even knew what the Internet was!
    I first got started in the world of computer-based communications back in 1986 just before I got my first real computer and signed up for an account on a local BBS while over at a friend's house. I was hooked right then and there and threw together a piecemeal system that suited my needs at the time just perfectly. It consisted of a very well-worn C=64, a cassette tape drive, 300 baud MoDem and a small black and white TV. Many people viewing this page on the World Wide Web have no idea what I am talking about, so I will attempt to elaborate as briefly as I can...
    It was a simpler time... a day when computers were interesting and fun. It was a day of 40 column ASCII text, of 5.25" floppy disks, acoustic coupling MoDems and 8-bit computers ruled the world. It was a day when many still used CP/M and analogue computing was in its peak. Most of the schools had Apple IIs, Atari and Commodore fought for dominance in the home market and only businesses used PCs. These were the glory days when 1MHz was fast enough for anybody, 64K of RAM would run anything they could throw at you and 16 colours still made for a decent picture. You had to notch your 5.25" floppy disks and flip them over to make use of the second side and would have done well in doing so because a 20MB HDD was in the neighbourhood of $500 (US). CDs were only for music and even then it was a show of status and everyone used to wonder how any MoDem could surpass 2400 bps and still use a normal phone line! Now that the industry has been assimilated by the Borg and all of the fun has been stripped away, you would be lucky to see your computer even boot up with many thousands of times that much memory and processing power. My finest memories were of The Pen, The Temple of Zuul, The Hermitage and a host of other Private BBSes that were in my local calling area at the time.
    These were also my teenage and high school years and before the drunken beer parties there were, of course, BBS parties, all-night role-playing games and late night pizza deliveries. The joy of these things was (aside from the entertainment value) the idea that computers were beginning to bring people from all walks of life together. People who would not normally socialize or interact with each other were coming together because of a cute little gadget called the "microcomputer". People would argue up street and down alley about which computer was the best but online you didn't know who had an Apple, who had an Atari or whatever, just as you wouldn't know if they were black, white or orange with pink stripes! The digital revolution helped to unify people who may have never met any other way.
    In tribute to the days long past and nearly forgotten, this text was originally scribed on my HP100LX palmtop PC via its Intel 80186 CPU, CGA graphics and MS-DOS 5.0! Those were the days, my friend...

Anyhow, that being over and done with, this is where you can go from here:

Bio Page

Poems, songs and misc. blathering

Friends, contacts and everybody else

Nifty People I have never met

Wasteland page (this game needed a page all its own)

Well folks, that's about all for the main page. There will be more later, I promise! This page is probably going to be an eternal work in progress, so bookmark it as you will and keep your eyes peeled. From here you can either check out my other pages listed above or send me some feedback. I can be reached fairly easily by shooting an e-mail over to rubble_fanger@lycos.com or by my ICQ#15447844. If you don't use ICQ, you can page me by sending an e-mail to 15447844@pager.icq.com and if I'm online at the time, I'll get back to you A.S.A.P. I have been known to occasionally partake of Trillian for my communications purposes, though I do not currently use it. What is Trillian, you ask? Trillian is one application that supports MSN, Yahoo!, AOL IM, ICQ and IRC simultaneously. You can have all five connections going concurrently and it draws minimal system resources in comparison to any of those individual clients. Best of all, it's free! Visit http://www.trillian.cc or hit the respective button located on this page to check it out for yourself.

Here are a few buttons to show support for some nifty freeware and other cool stuff:

Get the SID plug-in for your browser and hear what REAL computer music sounds like!

The official home of the Multi Arcade Machine Emulator. Retrogames rule!

As mentioned above, the ultimate chat and messaging program!

My favourite media player. Download it for free and check out all of the nifty skins and plug-ins!

Are we alone in the universe? Help find out from your computer at home or at work!

As I said, browser specific pages suck. Join the campaign today, it's free!