The Official Homepage

(Oh, don't look at me like that; most people have an opening page with more multimedia than the rest of the Web put together, so let me have my 1.5 words, OK?)

Welcome to The Official PC_Freak Homepage. My PGP key and fingerprint are below. (Really it's GPG, but if you know one you probably recognize the other without me saying so.)

New GPG keys: April 2, 2004

Welcome to my homepage.

You will not find any poetry about how my life sucks.

You will not find non-standard HTML tags.

You will not find very much eye-candy here, 'cause I have no use for it.

You will not find pictures of my friends, my family, or my goldfish. Images like that are bandwidth intensive, and no-one cares what my cat/dog/gerbil looks like asleep.

You will not find any webcams. No matter how intersting my life may be, you don't need an up-to-the-second status update, and odds are my life is significantly less interesting than such attention would warrant. If you truly are that interested in watching other people, seek help. Immediately.

You will find a subset of the projects I am working on. (Eventually.) These range from brain-fodder to active development, but by far most of them are still in the early development states. They include:

Ripple Generator for POV-Ray: Start a ripple on a plane and have it reflect off arbitrary borders. (Intended for use in ponds.)

The "Venus Project" (temporary title): The atmosphere of Venus is many, many times more dense than that of the Earth, and yields at least one interesting (theoretical) optical illusion. Unfortunately, the atmosphere is opaque to human eyes. But what if you could see...?

Hard-drive backup system: I've been looking for an inexpensive program to do hard-disk backup/restore to CD-R/CD-RW (both "mirror" and incremental functions desired), and haven't found one yet. Can I do it using DirectCD and DOS 7? Hmmm....

The Entity known as PC_Freak is not new; however, It declines to state when the Entity named Itself, nor will It state when the consciousness behind It arose, except under exceptional circumstances. (The Entity is also genderless, as befitting a creature of cyberspace: in this realm, the intelligence behind the words is the only thing that really matters.)

I strive to keep my pages as platform- and browser-neutral as I can: I code my pages by hand, and the only thing non-standard is the junk GeoCities appends to the bottom.

Finally, my name is PC_Freak (note the underscore). Others have adopted the same (or similar) name; if you are looking for someone named "PC_Freak", you better find some more specific information to make sure you've got the right person: last I checked, I found almost a dozen people with the same or similar aliases, and that number is probably higher by now.
Now that that's out of the way: Welcome!

View Page Stats You really should look at this; it's frightening how much information can be collected about you. I had consciously decided not to attempt to collect any information about my visitors, and while I knew that some information was transmitted by the browser during the page lookup--the type and version of the browser, for example--was startled by the amount of information the GeoCities servers was collecting. ("Soon" I'll try to post information about how to prevent this particular set of data from being detected.) Note: For some reason, Javascript must be on to view the page at all. (I can't explain it; I'll try to look into it "soon".)

Back in 2000/2001, I was working on a site for Palm VII/VIIx owners. Then came the dot-bomb crash, and most of the sites that used or supported the wireless Palm folded or dropped their support of it. This trend continues to this day, with Palm recently revoking their unlimited-access plan. Although an interesting idea, "web-clippings" have been superceeded by full-fledged wireless modems and pico-computers capable of running bare-bones web browsers, eliminating the need for web-clippings. Thus, there is probably little that the Palm VII can do that any of the current generation of Palms can.

In other words: There's no need for my site, since Palm VII is obsolete and few companies support it anymore.

Back in the closing days of 1999, I had an idea for an animation I wanted to do in response to all the FUD I was seeing and hearing about the Millenium Bug. I made it, and I'm a bit proud of it. The fact that I did on a timetable of nothing and with all borrowed components makes me a bit more proud of it. So here 'ya go: my animation, "Y Worry?" (Those of you who are curious can also read about how I made it.)

Two years in a row, I went on vacation and my hard-drive died. The third year it didn't, but it was a bit nerve-wracking for me waiting to see if it had lived or died in my absense. That story is only useful as a seguay to one of my favorite geek poems, "Abort, Retry, Ignore" (with all the appropriate apologies to Edgar Allen Poe).

Basically, the page you're looking at doesn't do a whole lot by itself. What it does do is to provide a doorway and bookmark into my corner of the web, wherein can be found some of the various projects I do: the (now defunct) Ring of Mediocrity, the yet-to-be-officially-named Palm-related website, and (transferring soon from a server near me) the Venus Project.
(By the way, everything you see here that isn't a GeoCities pop-up ad of some kind was written by me, and by hand. I don't like WYSIWYG editors: they're slow, they're dumb, and they produce code 8 times bigger than it needs to be. Really, if you're going to apply formatting to a page, you don't apply it to each individual line, you do it to the page.) Hey, where'd that soapbox come from?
More and more, people are finding out the benefits of distributed processing...whether it's Cosm (create-your-own distributed-processing software), SETI@home (I have mixed feelings about this one,) distributed.net (as far as I'm concerned, this was the original), or the Internet Movie Project. Basically, the purpose is to take the time when you're computer's idle time to do something. (ex: even if you're ray-tracing, the computer probably isn't using all of it's millions-of-clock-cycles-per-second; some of them are being wasted. If you have WinTop, see for yourself! It gets listed under "Idle.")
I mentioned ray-tracing a moment ago...basically, it's the art of modelling a 3-D world in the computer, and simulating the interaction of light in that environment. It's very time-consuming, but if done right, gives photo-realistic results. You can see some examples at the Internet Ray-Tracing Competition. If you want to try your had at some, you can use the 100% free POV-Ray ray-tracer.
Just about all my other internet links are on a separate page...cuts down on page size and loading time that way.
Like most web pages, I, too, have a guestbook...if you want, you can scribble on it yourself, or you can read the scratchings of others.

Got Anime? (or anything else you'd like to tell me?)

Holy Smokes!
This page has been hit times since June 5, 1996! Incredible!
(Actually, it's more like 100, but looking at this counter: you'd think it was a lot more. Well, GeoCities keeps doing something that messes up all the numbers, so I've seen the counter go from 150 to 999. Anymore, I don't even know why I keep that up, aside from the hope that one day it'll go Accurate again.)
Check back soon, and you may find some, all, or none of the following:

A point to this website!

More COLORful stuff!

Revocation certificate for my old key, followed by my new key: -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6-2 (MingW32) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org Comment: A revocation certificate should follow iNsEIBECAJsFAkCViaOUHQFUaGlzIGtleSB3YXMgY3JlYXRlZCB3aXRoIGEgdmVy c2lvbiBvZiBHUEcgdGhhdCB3YXM6CiAgIDEpIE9sZGVyIHRoYW4gdGhlIGN1cnJl bnQgdmVyc2lvbiwgYW5kCiAgIDIpIE5ldmVyIHZlcmlmaWVkIGFnYWluc3QgdHJ1 c3RlZCBzb3VyY2VzL2hhc2hlcwAKCRBU5jS6j25Q6aVFAJ9RAN8ssc01RHJd2k3m 8ez3YKFEEgCgoi6QgbUHaFwMbQYVhzuBwjcrOdc= =c4qT -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (MingW32) mQGiBECVj1cRBADfcTklIEgept6lPPEWUe2d4K4xOUu+x8zmzhCezYimRBxmJkrK UK33dBrDpVHywp/vI0wzmR/Y1pbuVzyU6dzJrBxxoXKcjMiWeE8JWT2bM3kambMR LtM/vm3b+gJhvbQqE9yyxd82BTi9DWpYl2IbpJa9tmSdd7O9k1Gg+Vk4mwCglCqP 6Jxce1rooeZrE1fTA+ri1sUEAM+g65GTJzwG4OBaLxQCMdw/i7NssBbpJR1pO5gh FMc17BeIzwjp9BjR0fSKD6Uj4vB7giRLZJ38DQj/VJLZy4vjX16sCC2kGY+t5heI 8Rc289vVQJ6nh0ERicCwe8Iq/RSCe2MGhCsWS3vwSk6nPLnohgjX4IUn1ASXwa0Q YfkuA/sGfiQ2QUpNZAmx07aqpiJoC/UaRJJRJdXyCTtCNy5Mzirf/44Gnjd81YQf k/s2SPU9/sUoPOim2WF4ribC9l74S4jNUlnZAvYXqn9/7gerloUdgoTVv+5XtLlS Pgg6d9XkJ+62E9eJFHCE3T2MS/J96ClM0/M45T+Or0G4R3GORLQIUENfRnJlYWuI ZAQTEQIAJAUCQJWPVwIbAwUJAeEzgAYLCQgHAwIDFQIDAxYCAQIeAQIXgAAKCRBd TtbnlTk9Kp7WAJ4vm3b2bP7CxsuArlidw8Ou0e3WzwCfWMqYG4XmcIQ8bz4Z3FnD AU/rO5W5Ag0EQJWPohAIAJf26EG3Cn+5D6AkbAalF+RdlI28pzhfxl2o7Sq0jLrv sRAF9w0dW4vvqFmZiTu51+Y4f1yoiyGp7C4LT1vRhoCp+0qQLk71YULJuR7vj0A8 lQmYj3oh1J5+ugcvdf1n6nPruT1YrHMbYPvWygdm1uNXGeU8/98I+P9/v7pUauml 0xc7q56XS00ozLD8SnRDBZ0FU5GNOWcdCwNDLVkqRj3jV1WcbMKAuEam1NLbuN1J u2Xq03RiCmjM0aloRgCfWaL8ti6gV41oUOBwTQ5m5UQTgRJF7NBstsSQ/P4jqJOT HjIaJRNyc9B6gZZZ04gKRaQKtvW4XWjedaCdI4z24YcABAsIAJM9KN/b568i38YR Mb0GibV5GRQg5QvF1zzuHm3f2jONoPrPJzgzExvestBTITpSPtPqu1E7k/aqfIr8 JpFgZWiwSFvHEIiLOF9aKt/8JmXEqj1ViRL455mA985ahSBQEHlK0xOi8KJC5mR9 e4+bKokKcavX0n9nHwNxx5CR2b0YyphBQv1JH9wharrDxPTW/PDLZWsVT2EOwEtB Hs7tJwMdC8HhXSLz7QIoTcmUutHHtuBpMXNJNPcrHn4MqiuK9ubWp/sEtMMIu5xQ JURY7ycVWWsaEErGhLASWKaoW+XZATqrgIOa+exaZEmjDEUnG0mLYIthDwZBKGRn eGJhyx6ITwQYEQIADwUCQJWPogIbDAUJAeEzgAAKCRBdTtbnlTk9KkipAJ4jfwtc wTsOUhLUubUi1s8kanOIRQCeNaStJiVm0ZXP4rfMPIvpn3PHDFQ= =/YNe -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Key fingerprint = 712B 1307 32B0 7817 9791 ECA6 5D4E D6E7 9539 3D2A
Some lines courtesy of the Interactive Graphics Renderer (but the above line was generated using QuickBasic and some clever screen captures! Bet you weren't expecting that, eh?)
This page would be compliant with the HTML standards, but GeoCities keeps adding non-standard HTML and JavaScript code (not to mention a Web Bug) to my pages...*GRUMBLE GRUMBLE*

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Document last modified:
April 2, 2004