I’m Dave Naylor, a bloke living in Leeds, England. I need to point out though that I’m not a native of these parts, I’m from Oldham, Lancashire and don’t you forget it. I have two daughters who both live with me although the biggun spends most of her time with her boyfriend or partying! I use the nicknames of Knocker and Caramboo. The first was given to me, the second is a long boring story. I basically just made the word up.
Everyone should know what a blog is these days, so this is mine. If you don’t know what a blog is, well, STFW. I’ve been blogging since before it was actually a cool thing to do. As far as I can recall I was definitely blogging in the 90s and my first brushes with the interweb were via a console and Mosaic. My first web site, I didn’t even call it a blog then, was hosted at my Demon Internet Account. It was essentially a front-end to my Fidonet Bulletin Board (BBS) named Frost Free that I ran for most of the ’90s. Fidonet diminished as public internet use grew and my BBS closed.
My web site morphed into an online diary using frames and static pages (eerrggh!). At some time or other I found the PHP Blogging tool B2 and I moved my now blog over to using that. It was probably around this time that Caramboo Dot Com came into existence. Early 2000s here I think.
Wordpress forked from B2 and I went with it. Caramboo Dot Com has been around ever since in several guises. It’s been full-on, seemingly abandoned, been subject to software changes and almost killed off yet it’s still here and probably will be as long as I am. I’m sometimes a prolific writer, more often not. I historically find things, play around for a few months then get bored and go and do something else instead. I think it’s a bloke thing.
My interests in life are or have been Cricket, Rugby League, Computers/Networks/Interwebby stuff, Horse Racing, Power Kite Flying/Parakarting, Music, The Glastonbury Festival, Several Other Music Festivals, Motor-Cycles, Photography. There are probably more that I can’t remember right now.
I use Gnu/Linux. Mainly Arch. Sometimes Debian/Ubuntu (and derivatives). I’ve dabbled with Mandrake, OpenSUSE, Mandriva, Red Hat, Yellow Dog, Gentoo and CentOS. Essentially Gnu/Linux is Gnu/Linux. I started to use Linux when the Commodore Amiga died. I wish I’d have jumped a long time before then.
I’ve only ever owned one Windows Licence. It came with a machine I bought in 1999. I dual booted for a while but it soon got nuked and I used the Windows CD as a coaster before eventually destroying it with a pair of pliers. I’ve had a few copies of Windows since, mainly to run stuff that wouldn’t run on Linux but I don’t do that any more. I don’t and won’t use Windows. The rest of the world may think it’s what you get on a computer and don’t know any different. I’m trying to teach the world about an alternative. One person at a time.
I spend my days trying to earn a crust through several methods (all legal of course). I’m not bothered about wealth, I just want to be in a position to not worry about paying the bills. I don’t think it’s a lot to ask.
I have a separate site (well in truth actually several) at http://me.caramboo.com. It just aggregates a lot of gumph that I get up to online in an attempt to keep this site clean and tidy.1
I have an account at Flickr where I keep all my photographs.
You can also find me on Twitter here: Caramboo. If you don’t know what Twitter is STFW
This site runs Wordpress and is served up to you by Nginx It’s self-hosted on my Linode VPS. If you click the link through to Linode and decided to grab one of their super cool Linux VPSs I should get some referrer credit. It’ll all go to helping out with the hosting costs.
If you want to run your own blog and can’t be hassled with all the server malarkey, I can offer some el-cheapo hosting and help you get up and running in no time at all. Contact me for more info.
So that’s me. If you know me comment somewhere to say hello. If you don’t give it a go anyway, I’m sort of nice.
- Actually I shut that site down at the end of November 2009. Lets say it’s in hibernation! [↩]
