About

Behind a Name

What’s behind a name? The tags with which we brand ourselves can have a whole range of hidden meanings. Sometimes the apparent meaning is not all that it seems to be, nothing more than a distraction from the truth.

I’m often asked what my web name means, and I tell everyone the same thing. It’s a play on my name. If at this point you want to have a public guess, then this is the place to do it.
Just to make it a fair test, there are two people on the site who do know what it translates into, so if you did guess right I couldn’t deny it (cheaply).

The only thing I will tell you is what it isn’t. Amie is not the French “Amie” meaning “friend”.

Beauty is Skin Deep

I suppose for all you ladies out there, you’re wondering what this swathe, sophisticated specimen looks like. Let’s leave it at “somewhere between Brad Pitt and the Elephant man”. If at some point Catherine were to enlighten you as to where on that scale I fall, so be it – but apparently I’m “dashing and handsome” and “have amazing eyes” – for an old man anyway.

Location, Location, Location

That would be the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Second star to the left and straight on until morning – basically. If you see a road sign to Olduvi, you’ve gone too far. That would be in Tanzania.

Who has a home page in this day and age?

I do. Frankly, I cannot stand blogging. I’ve little interest in peoples self opinionated drivel populated onto the Internet through often badly written CMS systems to clutter up search engines for the rest of eternity… but I digress.

So here you are reading my self opinionated drivel. But at least some effort and energy has to be expelled in putting it onto the web, so for that you should all be eternally grateful (or may be wish I had even less free time).

History of this Site

There once was a time when the Internet was a unthought of, and wholly unrealised day dream. Most of that is a haze, and so I wont bore you with my efforts at cognitive reconstruction.

I got on the net in December of 1995 (Line One, who remembers those guys?) and by January 1996 had moved to the beginnings of my love-hate relationship with BTInternet and started a website with nothing on it, with nothing to say, nothing to do and a sexy dose of HTML 1.0 gray page background! (Those were the days).

Thankfully HTML 2.0 and 3.2 remedied that, and I think once I had a suitable version of MSIE, we had Windows 95 clouds. From there on until 2000 there were a lot of sub projects, the site expanded, became a group site, became a community site and became nothing.

In September 2000 the site became ce320, which merged with SimplyHPC, which exploded and which then became HPC:Factor. If you are interested in that story click here or funnily enough the same thing on Wikipedia.

Microsoft then went and rolled out Windows Millennium, and this site became exclusively dedicated to my various nags about the Windows Media Player 7 bundled into it, plus a couple of other tech gripes (yep, they’re still in the tech section).

The site then stopped completely until the Spring of 2006 (now with Pipex having fallen out with BTInternet) when Rowena Pike decided I must be bored and needed to go and do something “constructive”. Having done something constructive and scored brownie points (C:Amie v1.0 – see GFX & Artwork), I quickly rehashed it into C:Amie v2.0.

In April 2007 I rejigged it again to get away from the Virtual PC branding, and here we are at the third version, or what is more likely to be the 7th version since 1996. I have lost count now.