So you want to know all about me do you?
I am now 57 years old and live on my own in a nice 1 bedroom apartment on the top (6th) floor (I usually refer to it as the penthouse suite) in a small town called Walsall, about 20k north of Birmingham in the West Midlands, England.
I have 3 sons and a daughter ranging in age from 22 years to 39 years. My daughter and eldest son have produced 8 grandchildren so far. Of course the 2 younger sons will no doubt add their contribution in the fullness of time.
I enjoy reading, eating, watching ice hockey, listening to and creating music (I play bass) and spending copious amounts of time on my web site and the Internet.
I have a very high-spec hi-fi and my musical taste ranges from (true) rock such as Yes, Rush, Hendrix etc. through electronic music from the likes of Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schultz, Tomita etc. and on to classical music from Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner and Bach.
My PC is new as of October 2009 and purchased for a mere £179 (tower, keyboard and mouse only). It is an eMachines EL1300 running both Win XP sp3 and Ubuntu and has an AMD Athlon LE-1640 processor set to run at 2.7GHz, 2Gb DDR2 RAM, GeForce 6150SE nForce 430 graphics with 512Mb RAM, 320Gb hard drive, dual-layer CD/DVD drive, numerous card readers and about 8 USB ports. I use my 24” wide-screen Samsung SyncMaster 2494HS High-Definition monitor set at a resolution of 1920 × 1080. I also have a Samsung Writemaster external CD/DVD multi-layer writer and a Harman Kardon Soundsticks III speaker system.
I enjoy my food. By that I don’t mean over-eating, I just enjoy my food. I’m particularly fond of Cantonese and Indian food though I tend to like anything spicy such as Mexican, Thai or a nice South African curry. I also like pasta and pizza and a range of “Mediterranean style” dishes, paella being a particular favourite.
The Bombsite started off in a small way when I began experimenting with Publisher. I then got interested in the code that it was producing and started to learn what it all meant. I soon realised that Publisher’s code was a total mess so I found myself a nice editor and started learning about and writing the code myself. When CSS became the vogue I was able to migrate to it fairly easily and haven’t looked back since. I’m still learning things all the time though. You can always find something out there that you haven’t tried before.
Initially I used the free web space provided by Freeserve (Wanadoo) or Blueyonder depending on which ISP I was on and I was fine with that for a couple of years but I reached a point where I wanted to try some new things that wouldn’t be possible on the freebies due to the lack of PHP and MySQL support. At the beginning of 2004 I registered thebombsite.com and moved to my current host – FreshlyPressed – in 2006. If you are looking for a host I cannot recommend this company highly enough. Excellent service combined with value for money.
The main aims behind The Bombsite are to promote Textpattern, a CMS, and give some tips and tricks on it’s use, not to mention some Themes and to have some fun in the process. At the same time it gives me the opportunity to learn more about site design and coding.