Previous updates: Year 2000AD

12/14/00 -

You should be reading this at my new address, www.datoppin.addr.com/. If you aren't, go there now; I will be deleting almost all content from my university's server before the week is over. I was hoping my domain would be working by now, but I've run into some technical difficulties. This probably won't be sorted out by Saturday, when I pack up my computer, so all I can suggest is use the above link, and check www.littlesputnik.net from time to time.

And a word of advice for those looking to buy their own domain: don't complicate matters by wanting to transfer your domain a few days after you buy it.

No new content. Perhaps I'll put up a new Commentary tomorrow.

12/12/00 -

I've purchased my new domain name, and will likely change hosts within 36 hours. The new domain is www.littlesputnik.net, although there's nothing there yet. I probably won't make any drastic design changes until later, and simply move everything over.

For now, I've cleaned up the Bio section somewhat (the pictures aren't messed up).

6000 hits. Another milestone in the history of the Little Sputnik.

Miscellaneous cleanups around the site which likely will go unnoticed.

12/08/00 -

Please be aware that Daren's Little Sputnik will soon be moving to its own domain. I plan to complete the move by next weekend, the 16th, after which time I won't have access to my computer.

Here and now, there's been some minor content changing in the right hand column. Raja, a chem-enger friend of mine from UW, has a new webpage that has been added. Also, I've fixed the bug in the What I am Reading mini-bio.

Oh yeah, and the reason why the Cohorts section hasn't been able to work is because I can't get UW's CGI junk to work, pretty much because UW doesn't allow access to their scripts. At least I don't think so. There is a way to implement scripts by email, but it's so much messier. In any case, this will all be resolved in a matter of days.

Thank you, that is all.

12/04/00 -

The commentary has finally been completed. My bio has been revamped, and the useless quotes have been given their own section. The mini-bio tweakage will have to wait until tomorrow. Please bear in mind that the bio page is still being updated, I just haven't had the time to flip the two pictures around.

11/30/00 -

I lied. No new commentary today. There will be one by the end of the weekend; I've just been busy with job hunting and the usual day-to-day annoyances. I have updated the mini-bios (at the top of the screen), so that they remain current. And yes, I am working on the Colleagues section.

11/29/00 -

I'm in the process of updating the Commentary section. I was hoping to put up a new commentary as well, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen tonight. Look for it tomorrow. You can preview the subject for now. 

Some useless stats for this month: 

Oh yeah, and now that I'm using MS Frontpage to make my webpages, I'll actually get down to finishing that Colleagues section that's been more or less dead for the past year.

11/24/00 -

Goddamn it, Homepage.com has screwed me over. They've been going through a few mergers lately, and I guess they decided not to continue with their original business plan of "99.9% uptime". I have no intention of sticking it out to see how things go; effective immediately, I'm back on the Waterloo servers, until I can buy my own domain. I'm through with this free shit. Hopefully, I'll be able to get all my pictures off of Homepage's servers before the shit hits the fan. 

So if you're reading this by using the traditional link, go here and update your bookmarks. Sorry about this.

On the bright side, the host of Discussion-board.com has generously removed the banners, so I no longer need to bypass them with my link. This means that the Soapbox is now much easier to remember.

11/20/00 -

Looks like it was a temporary problem with the Soapbox server. Everything's back to normal. Trevor, you can stop tearing your hair out now. :)

11/19/00 -

Okay, I don't know why, or even when, but the Soapbox, and pretty much all of Discussion-board, went down today. I don't know whether it's permanent or not, but I'm not going to panic just yet. I'll give it a couple of days in the hopes that maybe it's a server crash on their part before I start to look for a new home for the 'box.

11/17/00 -

I don't really have enough for a commentary, but we're a little over a week away and deciding who to vote for is still pretty near impossible, for me, at least. However, I would like to inform all those who may be interested that, if you intend to vote but you are outside of your electoral district, you can vote by special ballot by visiting Elections Canada and grabbing their conveniently provided special ballot request form. The deadline for submission is the 21st, but the form (plus your driver's licence with your home address) can be faxed in to their offices.

11/15/00 -

A new Commentary for you to enjoy. This is the political commentary I promised. Look for the next commentary at the end of the month.

Other than that, there have been no udpates.

11/09/00 -

I've decided it's time I eschewed the Luddite notion of low-tech, and so there will be a small number of script editions to this page. Most of the changes will be functional, meant to streamline my page. In other words, don't look for intense Shockwave movies any time soon.

A consequence of using more javascript and other higher-level coding is that I can't effectively use Netscape's Composer to make my pages. Composer just dumps too much garbage into the HTML files. Thus, if you see a larger number of errors than normal, please be kind about it. :)

My Bio has been updated, a little.

11/01/00 -

Nay's page is working, sort of... it's incompatible with Netscape, so you'll need to load up Winblowz' Internet Explorer 5, which (thanks to Gates' foresight) is included with every Windows 98.

Otherwise, no updates.

10/31/00 -
Right, so as I was saying before my computer crashed, wiping out the updates, I figured out why I dislike my job today: I've become a secretary. Nothing wrong with secretaries, but I signed on to become an engineer. Thus we see the root of my disenchantment.

New Commentary, more upbeat than the previous two. Nay's page has been added. The Rowing section was given a tad more content.

Contrary to popular belief, I will not be moving the Soapbox. I have no good reason to do so, discussion-board is turning out to be pretty good.

I'm still trying to think of a new name for this piece of shit.

10/30/00 -
Because it's now after midnight and I'm tired, this is just a quick statistical update.

First, thank you all for continuing to visit Daren's eMenagerie/Daren's Webdomain/The Known Universe/The Unnamed Website over the past year and a half. Either you're all constantly bored, or there's actually something of interest here. In any case, the number of official visits has broken 5000, which I suppose is something like 250 visits a month. Not bad.

Second, the stupid bug that eats up the spaces around my links is back. This sucks, but I'm not going to fix it until later.

Third, congratulations to Trevor for being the first Soapbox member to officially reach 150 posts (actually, it's 147, but he's been in TO since Saturday). Trevor is followed closely by Paul at 75 posts, myself at 47, and adrian at 44. There are 17 active members, with Per being the newest addition. 86 topics and 486 messages have been posted in the first month. Which I guess equates to an average of about 2 messages per visit.

10/23/00 -
Nothing new, just a few editorial changes. For eveyone's reading pleasure, I'm posting the federal party websites. Personally, my vote is leaning towards the NDP. While the provincial party has consistently screwed the pooch, the federals sound a bit different. Besides, I don't want to vote Liberal, and I'm afraid to vote Alliance. The fringe parties are just too fringe for me.
 

A shiny quarter to whomever can tell me the idiologies associated with the fringe parties.

10/19/00 -
Paul has fixed his site.

A slow back-half of the week, it seems... if this pathetic existence continues, I'm afraid I'll have to drop out and become an Arts major. I might have a new name for this place on Monday, but who knows?

A new Commentary for you to enjoy. Another long one, so grab a hot mocha first.:)

10/17/00 -
It looks like the laws of economics are as pervasive as some people theorize. All the competition from my "friends" (damn you all!!) has led me to update not once, but twice in a week! More difficult than taming entropy, I'd say.

Speaking of entropy, Paul's web server seems to have succumbed to it with a vengeance. Since I know he'll move as soon as he gets back from work on Thursday (or whenever), I'm not going to update his link just yet. Adrian's page jumped out of the gates fast, and even moved servers quickly, but has lost major ground to Trevor's frenzy of updates.

Rowing has received a few more updates, and I've removed My Links because it just got too useless. If you want it back, just say so. A few more resources have been added in the WWW section (who calls it the WWW anymore?). The long-neglected My Bio calls out for my attention, but it still sucks, so don't bother checking it. Cohorts is, of course, still non-functional. I've moved my resume to UW's Engineering server because having a banner on it is just not kosher.

Okay, wtf, someone registered TheKnownUniverse.com. Looks like I'm going to have to come up with a new name. More on this later.

10/13/00 -
I've put up a new Commentary, although this one's more rambling than comment. I guess I got carried away after not making any comments for 3.5 months.

Also, Steve was kind enough to cast his unasked-for vote of the most frequently updated webpage. Unfortunately, Steve, I don't think I should count the first couple days when Trevor was just getting started. Adrian has still had more than 2 updates in a week, which seems to be a record and is still more updates than Trevor's made anyway. Sorry, Trev. Speaking of pages, I've added Robyn's, even though she didn't tell me about it...

Some of you may have noticed Homepage was down for a bit this evening. I almost had a knee-jerk reaction and move the board elsewhere, but I've decided to give them a chance to prove this was an isolated event. That, and I've promised not to move around until the end of the month.

As I prepared to upload this update, Homepagegot their act together. Damn, they're fast!

10/10/00 -
Okay, I moved the main page again, because I found this place and so far I like it. They put a banner up, but it's not an annoying pop-up. Homepage is also very fast and reliable, or so I'm told. I get a real feeling of class when I go to their web page... I like! We'll see how long I can stand their ads before I find somewhere new.

Alright, I've finally changed the name of this place on a whim. If you don't like it, tough. Chances are, you don't care anyway. And in all likelihood, I'll change it again when the mood strikes me.

Also, I've put up a couple of sections to do with webhosting and certain other pages. Links to other people's pages are also up, in their order of appearance on the net. If you or someone you know has a webpage and you'd like to share it, contact The Known Universe, c/o Daren Toppin, Webmaster.

:)

10/01/00 -
Well, looks like there were a few technical difficulties with the double move that I overlooked.

9/29/00 -
As promised, the Soapbox has changed hosts. I'm now using the Ultimate Bulletin Board. It's more powerful, and has multiple forums which is an asset (for example, I might keep the previous month's posts in a separate forum). The only possible downside is that I can't remove messages, and I don't know whether or not there's a message limit. We'll see how things go if and when Adrian and Trevor go hog wild again. For now, I've set the Soapbox link to go directly to This Month's Rants. A slightly more sophisticated interface is being planned, but I haven't decided how that will work out just yet.

Also, you may or may not be reading this on Internet Trash, since they're pretty good about ads and still give a decent 10MB of space. Fortune City gives 100MB of webspace, which is cool, but a pop-up banner, which ain't so cool, and is friggin slow. Yeah, 'net Trash is also pretty slow, but it's better than Fortune City. Anyway, once again we'll see how things go.

Oh, and I found a "Related Pages" section that I had made a few weeks ago, then forgot about.

9/21/00 -
I finally have full net access!!

Now before you all get excited, I'd like to mention a few things:

I'll be in TO this weekend, so I won't be even thinking about this webpage. However, feel free to email me some suggestions for a new name. And FYK, the Soapbox will be setting up house in the UBB I polled everyone on a while back.

Oh, and I almost forgot. I'd like to state that I don't know who anonymous posters are, and there's no easy way for me to find out. All I can do, if I were so inclined, is find out the IPs of everyone who posts a message. While this might be helpful in figuring out if several anonymous people are the same entity, I don't see how I could possibly care. If people want, I can go and have a little proggy log the IPs of every visitor, and have a cookie sent and returned to invade everyone's privacy. However, I currently have no such tools. And the web counter sucks. I'd switch it, but it took so damn long to get up to 4000 hits.

7/12/00 -
How about that, two updates within a two week period... school must be getting to me.

Anyway, in line with my recent trend to reminisce, I've (read: in the process of doing) added a "Colleagues & Cohorts" page, to try to keep contacts with those I've known. Not that I'll probably ever use those contacts, given my track record, but it seemed like a good idea today in Calculus.

6/28/00 -
Alright, not much happening right now, although I'm glad to see the Soapbox being used a bit more frequently. I guess school had a tendency to keep people a little too dispirited. In any case, I've added a new Commentary, cleaned up the links a bit (a small bit), and obviously cleaned up the updates. I'll be removing another month's worth of messages this Thursday as well.

Also, to those of you interested, I'm in the process of collecting and eventually creating a CD of the music the SGS concert band played during the three years we made the band. I've got the final concert of our final season, but I'm having difficulty remembering some of the songs we played earlier. Gimme a shout if you've got the goods!

Oh yeah, almost forgot, happy (much) belated 1 year anniversary to the Soapbox and Daren's WebDomain, aka The eMenagerie. Pleasing to know this beast is still around. One of these days, though, I'll learn how to program CGI script, and then look out! 'cause the WebDomain won't never be the same again.

o Back to My Corner o