Ramblings

These pages contain just my regular ramblings.

Most of the time they will contain any particular type of subject that comes to my mind. And since I have many different interests, these subjects vary widely, all depending on the particular topic at hand.

Below you find a collection of such ramblings

Here is one about facsimile, 'Safe Fax". Though it is not from my own hand, I found it somewhere a long time ago, I thought it was funny enough to justify presenting this to you.

You know about internet, and probably also about Usenet, newsgroups. I used to visit many newsgroups and sometimes was appalled at the junk and especially the spamming in some of them. Spamming is sending a (usually obscene, controversial or insulting) message to many, many, groups at the same time. Nowadays spamming is related to all the advertising in your mailbox.
Anyway, at one time I was so upset I decided to react to some of them with the following article. To my surprise someone then distributed it in the humor section of usenet.

You must sometimes be awed, just like me, when you see all this new technology coming out on the internet, and often totally without coordination. It seems nowadays you find no standards at all. This got me all riled up one day, resulting in the article Do you speak.... It is about the tech-talk you hear around everyday, my thoughts about what happened to standards, and the differences between programmers in beginning 1970s and today.

Incidentally for your entertainment and education this is my first web page I built years ago. I decided I had to find out how it worked....

Once upon a time I had to explain to some people what the internet really is. This resulted in me writing an article The Internet Explained. It gives you a brief overview of what the Internet is and is not.

From 1985 I was a member of the FidoNet. It was a network like the internet, except that it would take a longer time to pass your information around the world. I naturally had a Bulletin Board System (BBS) called 'Amsterdam BBS 4U', which provided the same services like most websites do today. It had e-mail, forums (discurssion boards, files and images for download etc. Us SysOps (System Operators) also had the same problems, and this article that I wrote talks about that: Uit oogpunt van de SysOp

Some of you may well remember some problems in Indonesia. Some of these boil down to the downright arrogance and blatant denials of any wrongs in that country. Indonesia In A Nuts-shell is an article where I underline some of these ehmmm... differences of opinion with other nations.