Please note:

My friends!

Falling Cow Productions. This is Iain's page. He's just nuts, although he claims that he is, in fact, a bubbling cauldron of nefariousity.

Visit the homepage of Paul. And while you're there, read Pigeonman. Then send copious amounts of email requesting more! Although, he is a busy, busy guy, so you might want to not.

Thanks to Paul for his advice, HTML help, and troubleshooting while I was putting this page together. Next time, I should not wait quite so long between updates, so I don't forget how to do it. :)

Tarrackin's Home Scroll Also, some thoughts on the current defense status of our nation from an ex-army boy can be found here. Although sometimes it does turn into a rant about various things, and rightly so.

Also, thanks to Tarrackin for his advice, HTML help, and the title bar at the top. My graphical talents are under-developed - without him, or Paul (see above), this page would be a shadow of it's current glory.

This is the homepage of one of my oldest friends, Vaughn. Check out his links page - he has links to some of his POVRay raytraced graphics. As you'll discover, he's quite a Frontier fan.

Here's the page of Debbie. She's another of my oldest friends. I went to school with her brother, and gradually got to know her through him. He moved to Wellington, and we started chatting on ICQ a bit more. She's brainy with ambitions, this one.

This is Amy's page. Yes, you guessed it: she's another of my oldest friends. About the same vintage as Vaughn and Debbie. (Ooh, funky. I've listed them in reverse alphabetical order. I need a hobby.)

Here you can find Marie's website. She's an artist. You can tell. :)

Her husband, Dave, has a website right here. Make of that what you will!

Random pages from the net

And speaking of hobbies, here's one for you: the Alan Parsons Project. Two pages for it - the Psychobabble Webpages and Encyclopaedia Projectologia. If you've not heard of them (and you must have, unless you haven't seen the second Austin Powers movie), then give them a listen. They're a band who made "concept albums" during the 70s and 80s.

Here is CCRMA ("karma"). It's "a collection of rpms that you can add to a computer running RedHat 7.3, 8.0, 9 or Fedora Core 1 to transform it into an audio workstation with a low-latency kernel, current ALSA audio drivers and a nice set of music, midi, audio and video applications." RPMs are the package management system used by Redhat, and several other Linux distributions (including Suse).

After a brief attempt to do some video editing in Linux, I nearly had a nervous breakdown. See my movies page for further details on that. Anyway, I spent some significant time trying to get some video and sound streamed together, and rendered to a suitable file stream on my hard disk. Failure after failure, crash after crash, until I found Main Concept's MainActor. This program has yet to crash on me, and it works like a charm. It goes for $US199 ($NZ300), but I strongly feel that it's worth every cent, especially after the nightmare that was Cinelerra.

Vaughn may be a fan of Frontier, and I am too, but I also like Elite: the New Kind. Unfortunately, the website for it doesn't seem to be working, but if you're keen, it can be found elsewhere on the net. Google can point you on your way. It's a very nice version of the original game. It involves the reverse-engineered source code from the original BBC version of the game, which has been re-written in C. You can grab the source code and play with that, compile it, or whatever. It runs in both Windows, and Linux. There may even be a Mac version, I'm not sure.

You're probably running a version of Microsoft Windows, as most people are. This also probably means that you've never heard of Linux, which is a competing (and free!) operating system. I've run Redhat Linux for about 3 years now. Recently, however, Redhat decided to focus on the server and business market, rather than the desktop market, so they formed the Fedora project, which targets the desktop market, while Redhat concentrate on their target market. Linux is an Open Source product, which their direct competitors (and a whole bunch of right wing nutjobs) would have you believe is communist and therefore evil. Open Source does have it's strengths, though - as it's open, anybody can see into the project, and take whatever parts they like for their own use (although there's a little more to it than that).

If you're running MS Windows, the chances are that you're reading this site using Internet Explorer. Well, I'm not, most obviously because I'm not using MS Windows. Instead, I use the free Firebird as my browser. Mozilla is more secure with many, many fewer security alerts than Internet Explorer (however, there was a security flaw recently discovered, although this was rapidly secured) and is also Open Source. You can get executable binaries for Windows, Linux and Mac from the above link. You can also get the source code from there, too.

Do you have an office suite? If you don't, or if you have an illegal version of Microsoft Office, then it's time to consider OpenOffice. It's free, you can't go to jail for having it (unless Microsoft have their way), and it's compatible with Microsoft Office. It has a presentation manager, spreadsheet, database, and of course it has a word processor. I use it exclusively, for several reasons, partly that Microsoft Office isn't available for my Operating System, but mainly that even if it were, I'd still not use it. I've seen far too many people lose assignments (and had to retype them in the 30 minutes before they were due) to various older versions of MS Office, which appeared to corrupt the save file. (Naturally, this would only happen when they saved the very same document as a back-up file, corrupting their back-up, too.)

Ever go to draw a picture, and find that Paint just isn't up to the task? Do you really own that copy of Adobe Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, or Ulead Photoimpact, sitting on your hard drive? No? Then perhaps you should consider GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Long touted as "as good as Photoshop," I use it to edit photos, draw simple pictures, play with graphics, or add effects to video streams. I would call the interface a little clumsy, and hard to use until you're used to it, but then I find Photoshop a bit hard to use to start with, too. While GIMP isn't really up to the standards of Photoshop, it is free, and it can do pretty much anything you'd need it for.

An off-shoot of GIMP, is Cinepaint. What's the difference, you ask? Cinepaint is an off-shoot of GIMP, modified for use by visual effects studios. It was used in the production of Scooby Doo, Stuart Little I & II, Blue Crush, 2 Fast 2 Furious, Harry Potter, Cats & Dogs, and a whole bunch of other films. It's obviously a fairly professional product.

This one is some guy I've never met, but I stumbled across his page one day. Funny! Unspeakably Stupid Stories

Do you remember Sledge Hammer? If so, go have a look through this site. Aaaaah the memories. Plus, the Return of Sledge Hammer reads awfully like a treatment... let us hope.