Welcome to my partly-open door; please, tiptoe in and walk around (I could call it a partly-open window, but this is too interactive for that). You may notice construction dust here and there, and sometimes that a wall has been moved or a new door cut. Occasionally rooms disappear entirely. Please be a polite guest and don't rattle locked doorknobs.
All the pages here are about me, in some way or another, from person to opinions to views (no politics; I don't have any that I care to explain). From my taste in music, to my hobbies, to some pictures I like, to mailing lists I run, to some favorite things on the Internet, each page's contents says something about me. It may not be clear what, but then again I never promised I was a clear person.
It's also a collection of experiments with the World-Wide Web. Experiments with presentation, experiments with contents, and experiments with strange features. Some of the experiments may not work very well; if you think something here doesn't, tell me. I may fix it.
None of this is official; none of this is the opinion of the University of Toronto. If you want the bit of me that is that, you need to look elsewhere; everything here is purely unofficially me.
I have a new toy at work; a new workstation, an SGI R5000 Indy. I have this because CQUEST went through a convulsive change over the summer of 1996 to SGI hardware from the DEC MIPS hardware it had been using before. In the process things broke and haven't been fixed yet, including some of the above links. At some point I may put up a page about all the SGI bug reports I've made; I'm up to 18 filed (as of Sept 19th 1996; many more now), not counting problems and bugs with their bug reporting software, and with more coming down the pike.
It's interesting to look back at the project and see how many of our plans went down in flames (although it will probably be even more interested to look back when it's all over). For example, the plan to have me entirely using my new workstation; all my files, all my mail delivery, this web serrver, and really a lot of my environment still lives on the old workstation. A jury rigged set of stuff has me actually sitting in front of the new one, and it actually works pretty well. Even if Indys have lamely slow serial ports, they're no worse than the DEC machines. All of this has put a skid on my plans to put more content here (such as the nice picture of myself a friend scanned and passed to me). This relatively modest burst is inspired by stumbling over CJ Silverio's journal, which is a bigger project than I'd consider undertaking.
One thing that's nice about the Indy is that it has all sorts of neat multimedia toys, like built in audio and video (good enough audio that it can read music CD-ROMs from the CD-ROM drive, pipe them through the audio system, and dump them in my headphones). I've already used them to make a couple of useless pictures, such as the clutter of my desk or another of me in the office with my headphones on. I spend a lot of time listening to music in the office; I spend a lot of time listening to my music collection period.
I use a lot of hypertext links in these pages because I like to. They should all be footnotes, not continuations; follow them only if you're interested in the subject. If you're interested in me, you'll want to follow some of them anyways; my life has some pretty important footnotes. Some of them are jokes, some of them are serious, and any large ones should have warnings. Look first anyways (if your browser doesn't show you link targets, get a better one).
I don't believe in backlinks. It's a job for your browser, which can back you up the way you came in, not for me to guess where you'll think back should go. This is not a MUD; you can arrive from anywhere and depart to anywhere. If I thought a page was a likely target for a link from outside, I stuck an author tag and link at the end. Maybe I guessed wrong about what people would link to; if I did, send me mail telling me where you went and where you came from.
Chris Siebenmann
