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Some Ancient Passages from my "Hot List"

Well, NCSA Mosaic called it a hot list (not "bookmarks"), and I've stuck with the term. Mosaic predated Mozilla by some considerable time. Most of these are a little on the "old" side. The links, dufus, not the people! Actually, I've started to add a few new people, starting at the top so the older links will eventually percolate down.

Net.People

How many of you remember Brendan Kehoe? He's the author of the original guide to the 'net, Zen and the Art of the Internet, and as he says some nice things about me on his page, I really should have returned the favour long ago! His Mom has an online presence too.

K.A. Corlett is a really cool and amazing author. I mean, how can you not like a novel that combines the best of the "are you being served" essence with a fascinating tale of vampires and French/Canadian culture? As my significant other will attest, while I was reading Ever your Servant, I was constantly giggling and just couldn't contain myself. It is really, absolutely, irresistible, so dammit people, go buy a copy from K.A. herself and support a wonderful author!

Don Wells maintains an amazing amount of information on FITS, the Flexible Image Transport System used by most of the Astronomical Community. Don is one of the prime movers behind the famous and extremely useful AstroWeb resource. Use it if you are interested in Astronomy.

Robert Lentz's "old" page has some interesting if dated Astro/Space/Mac/SF stuff, including a hilarious summary of Star Trek episodes. He even knows one end of AIPS from the other!

Karen Strom has a domain, which is at least as interesting as her Hanksville page.

Jeff Uphoff's NRAO page was quite interesting at first (having been created in 1993 or earlier on uppieland when it and he were at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg) but underwent a full frontal lobotomy in 1995. Jeff (who escaped this fate himself — I think) is a Linux Guru and is, in his own words, the madman responsible for the AIPS port to Linux (also in 1993; on a 386/25! The large ddt test took over a day to run...) He's also one of the two people who did most to get NRAO to pay serious attention to Linux (The other one was Rob Millner). If you ever run into Jeff, buy him a brownie (don't ask, just do it!). After a few years of sysadmin/BOFH work at NRAO/CV (who do you think started the usenet bofh.* hierarchy?), which included the initial work on the Linux NFS lock daemon, co-running some big (more like huge) mailing lists about Linux security (his PGP key made it into the January 1996 Linux Journal), and flying around the skies of central Virginia, terrorizing the carrier pigeons and causing all those dropped network packets... He now works for a software appliance company, though he's doing much of the same sort of work.

Ruth Milner was the NRAO's Chief Sysadmin at the AOC in Socorro, and has a somewhat minimalist home page (-:) For a while she was Computer Security Manager at NRAO, a role which she somehow managed to pass on to me. Gee, thanks Ruth! :-}

Anton Zensus created a quite useful page while he was at NRAO; at least it's useful if you're an Astronomer. Alas, the site he once pointed me at (which caused me nightmares for a week; it was a "singalong with James T. Kirk" site that had Shatner's rendition of "Mr. Tangerine Man"; 'nuff said) seems to be lost. Anyway, Anton moved back to MPIfR, Germany in 1997 (to a new leadership position) though he still shows up at NRAO every year or so.

Matt Mead is an advocate for FreeBSD, which is (like Linux) a freely available Unix system for the Intel architecture. Originally hailing from Blacksburg, where the concept of builtin ethernet connections in apartments first came to light (in the 1990's, way WAY before broadband).

The Moylans (Tom, Liv, and family) should have been mentioned here ages ago. I knew them both in college way back in the '70s (ack! It doesn't seem like... er, um, well, never mind how many years!). Liv in particular has done a great job of keeping track of a bunch of us; she found me on the web a few years ago when first setting up their pages (read them; people should be aware of Williams Syndrome). And she's been behind the Halley Tontine reunions we've been enjoying for many years now.

Kieran Commins is a former classmate of mine from UCD Physics, who is now in the Irish "Met" Office (National Weather Service) and is active in the Irish Meteorological Society.

Alan Bridle has a really nice and informative image gallery of his recent work. Highly recommended. He once had some (scary) info on Y2K but that's sort of old news anymore.

And finally, you haven't experienced the web until you've seen Barney O'Borg, er, I mean Tony Perreault's web page. You just have to agree with the sub-heading on his Musings of a Yankee site (Hint: keep your stick on the ice). I can't think of a better way to end this list! Tapadh leat, a chara.