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Who/What/Where/When/Why
Other Websites I Administer
(Ancient) History of This Site

       This website is not like all the others,
because its creator is not like all the others.

Who/What/Where/When/Why

At this point in Earth's development, by far the second most exciting career (after Lamborghini test driver) is to be a musician. And so I find myself in this humanoid incarnation, living in Buckinghamshire, England from the end of the 20th Century until the middle of the 21st. My work on this planet, as documented here on this website, centres around developing new musics and ideas to evolve the species. As a leading cyberneticist once said, "The meaning of life is to increase fitness."

Other Websites I Administer

www.thesmith.org.uk/web - The Smith's Forge web design services
www.drummingisfun.co.uk - my own company website: Drumming Is Fun
www.fusingglass.co.uk - Tessa Verrecchia's fused glass studio in Hertfordshire
www.bitzia.co.uk - Fabrizia Verrecchia: classical Indian dancer & yoga teacher

All of these websites are hosted by Mythic Beasts

Former Websites I No Longer Maintain

www.wildpeace.uk - Chrissie Martin's holistic therapies & workshops (here's an archived version of my design)
www.helaynaliviero.co.uk - Helayna Liviero: Street dance teacher & performer (no longer online, but archived)
www.africa-junction.co.uk - Africa Junction: drum, dance & song - my old band (here's a broken archive)
www.hartbeats.co.uk - Justine Hart's African drumming & dance

(Ancient) History of This Site

2006: Migration to TheSmith.org.uk

In summer 2006, I moved my original website to its own domain, and took the opportunity to restructure things a bit.

What follows is old stuff detailing the history of my original home page...

2002: The Story So Far...

These web pages grew out of my explorations into the wonderful world of GNU/Linux, and my (still unrealised) plans to design and build a silent Linux workstation for use in my music studio. The many lists of bookmarks expanded beyond belief, so I thought I'd convert the files to HTML so that anyone treading a similar path could use them as signposts.

I wanted to make a site with a minimal bandwidth footprint, sleek and swift, inspired by my friend Ian Gregory's home page. As a 56K modem user, I see little point in clogging up the Net with loads of adverts and cheesy graphics. Hopefully these pages will be accessible to all, whether browsing by text, braille or screen-reader.

All data was written from February 2002 onwards, using Mama's old 486 to begin with. I pray forgiveness for using the MS Windows 95 'operating system' already present, while I learned the True Way and installed Debian. The HTML was hand-coded using Notepad and DOS ftp, and previewed in MS Internet Explorer 5.5, Netscape 2.02 and Lynx, then validated as HTML 4.01 compliant. Please tell me if you find any errors or broken links, or have trouble using other browsers.

2003-06-09: Debian Lives

OK, Debian now lives and Microsoft goes the way of the dodo. I'm now writing web pages using KATE, surfing with Mozilla Firefox and Lynx and reading mail with Mutt. It really is true what they say. While still waiting for PC processors to become suitably cool, quiet and powerful before I build my Ultimate Linux Audio Workstation, I seem to be acquiring a whole fleet of old PC's for assimilation into a Linux network, not to mention an ancient Acorn Archimedes A3020 and now my ol' faithful Beeb. Trying really hard not to open a museum...

For my latest adventures, you can check my Journal.

2003: Colours In The Darkness^*

OK, the more perceptive among you may have noticed that my website has changed colour, not to mention becoming a bit more centred. [The entire site was originally blue text on a black background.]

Some people had commented on the dark colours being a bit hard to see; this got me thinking and suddenly I remembered that there is no need to specify colours in a web page, because that should be up to the user. Indeed, a browser should control all of the page formatting and display details, rather than the web-page author. Sadly many web authors today try to nail down everything to a precise page format, thus losing the fluid capabilities of HTML to be adaptable to any browser running on any system, be it Mac, PC, mobile phone or PDA.

So, I've been stripping out the colour tags from the pages, so that the default settings will be used. Lo and behold, diving into Internet Explorer's Tools/Options menu, I found the page to change the default colours, so now I can view my website in whatever dark and twisted colour scheme I choose, as can you!

I find a white background hurts the eyes after a while, preferring to have blue text on black. My old 14" monitor is too flickering and distracting with a whole page of white for the CRT to scan, so I give it a rest and just let the electrons light up the words in the void. One day I'll buy an LCD (or two ;-) [at last, I finally did] But really, I suppose I am harking back to my upbringing on a BBC Micro...

The colours of some pages like Dada and Tibetan Singing Bowls are preserved for effect. The Air Invasion page (and any other print-worthy page, such as my Recipes) are black on white so it can be printed easily without wasting (expensive) colour inks. (We do like to think of your best interests :-)

^*A 1985 track by Klaus Schulze