About
About Me
Who am I? I’m a rather odd fellow, I’d imagine; I have many many interests (just about everything apart from chemistry and law) and follow them all obsessively. These range from painting models to playing with my car (or, on occasion, other people’s cars) to writing websites or programming. I harbour plans and designs that would one day let me take over the world (Bwhahahahaha). This site, and any spinoffs associated with it, are designed to one day allow this. How, I’m not sure. When, I’m not sure. I’m just sure. You gotta trust me on this one.
I’m a student doing Electronics and Communications Engineering at the University of Kent in Canterbury. I’m fairly well-versed in PHP and XML, and know some C++, Pascal, Java, and several other programming languages. I really dig scifi, and cyberpunk to a degree, am a fan of history, and I love to read in general.
Spaceships are cool. Starships are cooler. I make a distinct difference between the two.
Aside from being a pedant, I’m a fairly progressive-minded guy with a couple of more conservative tweaks. Hate war and killing, that’s why I play toy soldiers (check out the Airsofting section).
Computers rock, especially if you grok them. Digital is t3h future. I firmly believe that there is nothing in the analogue world that at this point cannot eventually be reproduced with equal or superior quality digitally.
Email: cmdr-fire@cmdr-fire.co.uk
MSN: cmdrfire@hotmail.com
Gmail (if you’re into that): cmdrfire@gmail.com
About the site
The Commander Fire website has been around in some incarnation or another since about 1997. I’ve used it as a web log long before the term ‘blog’ was invented; I just never ever updated the site. Back then the domain was owned by another entity, which fell apart in ’99. Shortly after a messy spate when the server was down for about three months, I took control of the domain after a brief legal battle, which was decided in my favour by Nominet UK. Whilst I’ve got many things to say about Nominet, I do suppose I owe them thanks for deciding in my favour back then. After regaining control of the domain, I tried (and failed) to do a CMS in Flash; it failed, and since then I’ve (for the most part) given up on flash-based websites. I just threw something together using basic HTML and (ugh) MIVA. In 2002 I found out about Postnuke, installed it, and taught myself PHP because that was kinda cool at the time. A Postnuke-enabled site went live in February 2003, which was a major change to the previous functionality of the site, and it was what got me into PHP-enabled CMS systems. I’ve updated the PHP version, expanded to control a number of servers and started doing webhosting solutions for people, as well as designing websites. Apart from a major overhaul of the look of the site in August 2004, the site has remained mostly as it was, until I got bored of my ageing hacked PN release and started looking for something a little more “modern” (not to mention W3C compliant). After numerous investigations, I eventually settled on WordPress, which is the way the site will be for the foreseeable future unless something else spiffier catches my eye. Now that’s probably way more information than you wanted to know.
