#@&%! Facebook

Hmm, I just have had the distinction of being blocked from sending further messages on Facebook because it detected my activities were abusive to others.

Sheesh!  All I was doing was trying to re-connect with a few friends from the 1990s Newcastle BBS world.  Okay, well, QUITE a few friends from the BBS world.  Still, the activity I was doing certainly WAS legitimate, private use of Facebook, for EXACTLY what the intended use was.  IE "Facebook helps you connect with your friends".

Well, I guess I'll just have to stop posting messages on FB for at least a few days.  I really have no choice!  If you reply to me on FB, please forgive the lateness of reply, as I'm blocked.  The block will last "from a few hours to a few days", whatever that means.  I'll try to use normal email for now anyway.

It's amazing how connection with ONE old acquaintance can lead to connections to a dozen old acquaintances.  But that's how it goes, I suppose.  We are all connected somehow.

Slow Progress

It was late last year when I started looking for old schoolfriends in various ways, and at the start there were precious few I could track down.  It is amazing how far and wide we have spread.  Some are not even still in the country.

Anyway, at the start I had managed to contact eight or nine of you, and it stayed reasonably static for a few months.  In the last few months, however, the contacts list has steadily grown, and now I have email addresses for 23 of you.  It seems to be snowballing.

One of the best tools for doing this is, of course, Facebook.  I didn't quit on "World Quit Facebook Day" on 31 May past.  Why would I want to do that, just as the quest for former schoolfriends is getting interesting.  Anyway, things don't happen overnight, I have planted some more seeds, and they will probably germinate over the next week or so.

Incidentally, I have been given about eight class photos in the last DAY to add to the Gorokan High Website.  I'm pleased to say they are all online now as we speak.  See http://my.integritynet.com.au/wdgi/class_photos.htm

Newcastle BBS History

Just came across an old notebook I kept when first using Bulletin Boards in Newcastle.  It contains some historical records I want to put down for later use and to get on to a Google Search for other people's reference in the future.

In January 1990 I noted these Bulletin Board Systems in the Newcastle region:

Communication 2000 run by Ian Mason.  Based in Toronto, this was probably my favourite system.  Ian started off using QuickBBS, then went to Remote Access.  He got sick of running a BBS for nearly a year, then returned with a vengeance with software called BBS-PC, which he paid big bikkies for and renamed the BBS to \/ector X BBS.  Unfortunately the user-friendliness of this system was not up to scratch, although it had a lot of power.  The problem was many commands required several letters to execute (almost a command line interface at times) and while I found this a brilliant facility, not many other users were into it, who preferred the usual one-key commands.  After suffering from diminishing call rates, Ian pulled down BBS-PC and returned to Remote Access.

Ian was a consummate sysop who setup his system with the users in mind, and was very attentive to detail.  His day job was as a school teacher.

Cybertron was run by Brett McKenzie on QuickBBS, then made the transition to Remote Access, like probably everyone else at the time.  Brett was located at Georgetown.  Brett, like me, had several problems paying his phone bill and was off the air for some months at a time.  The BBS disappeared after a few years of sporadic operation.

Mega Technology TBBS was the biggest and oldest system in Newcastle.  It was a three-line system, with the biggest hard drives, and offered that incredible facility of the day of multiline chat!  It used TBBS (or The Bread Board System) which didn't allow the operation of standard Remote Access BBS doors, and the ones available for the TBBS software were pretty lame, in my opinion, although they all had multiline capability.

The sysop was Stan White and the system operated out of Boolaroo.  Stan used to also run a computer shop at Boolaroo.  The system was probably the first to offer online CD rom access, which meant there ended up being a massive lot of files online.  I remember Stan saying at one point he could no longer add any more devices as he'd used up all the letters of the alphabet in drive names!

Bill's BBS was an interesting system at Broadmeadow, and run by Bill Mastrippolito (AKA Mastro).  This system ran on an Apple //e system on a 5 megabyte hard drive, and was quite basic, although it was normally up most of the time.  Naturally it didn't offer network messaging or all that much in the way of file downloads, but Bill persisted with running it for quite a few years mainly to prove a point that an Apple //e COULD actually run a Bulletin Board.

The Local BBS was located at Tighes Hill, sysop was Tony Dodds and ran Quick BBS (later Remote Access).  I didn't use this system very much and have precious little in the way of notes on it.

Small Business BBS must have been near Lambton somewhere (from the phone number I have) and I don't have any notes on it at all.  If I can recall correctly the sysop was Geoff Bilborough and the system was aimed at providing a network for small business owners in the local area.  It didn't get much action, and was frequently offline.  I think Geoff had a lot more to do than ensure his BBS hobby was well-maintained.

Newcastle Microcomputer Club (which was founded in October 1976) met twice a month (2nd & 4th Monday of each month in 1990) at the University.  NMC BBS was run by the clubp and the long-suffering Sysop was Tony Nicholson.  The system was on a phone line at the uni, and so used to operate outside business hours - ie 5pm to 9am Monday to Friday and 24hrs on Saturdays and Sundays.  I have an extract from Tony's section of the NMC newsletter (Jul/Aug 1990 issue):

"A hard disk failure put the system off the air from about 19:00 Friday 1st June until 17:00 on Tuesday 5th June.  Some files and messages entered in the system on 1 June have been lost. "

"We've had two hard disk drive problems lately.  Firstly, the old 20 Mb Miniscribe (which used to be in  the old CP/M BBS System) started giving lots of errors and making a whining noise.  It has been retired.  Then (just after doing a lot of work getting the network software going) the newer 32 Mb drive stopped with a "general failure on drive C:" message.  I could not do anything on the weekend (it happened on Friday night) so the system was down for four days while I did a low level format and ran drive diagnostics.  Luckily I had made a full backup only hours before the failure so only a few messages were lost".

Other Systems existant in Newcastle included the Hunter Schools BBS, Sysop name was Troy Harper which was a small system based in Newcastle West, operated by some local education establishment and run by students.  Also there was a BBS called the Novocastrian Computer Link (sysop was Matt).

On the Central Coast there were a couple of systems.  Coastal Opus at Kariong was run by Kevin Mann, which used the Opus-CBC BBS program, which wasn't really good for games and downloads, but Kevin was a dedicated mail mover who was later to become both network and region co-ordinator in Fidonet.

Another very interesting system was The Round Table BBS which was run on an Amiga out of Koolewong and used a Skypix system.  This wass software ahead of its time.  As well as being able to use ANSI graphics, both monochrome and colour (like almost all other systems at the time), Skypix also allowed users to download a set of what we would now call avatars - full graphical pictures that were displayed instead of ASCII characters.  This was well before the invention of HTML (hypertext markup language) and the invention of the world wide web, of course, but the system was before its time.  For a start, you needed an Amiga computer to be able to use it, so the 5% of computer users at the time with an Amiga would have been happy.  Unfortunately this BBS was at STD rates for me, and I didn't login all that often.

I suppose I need to add that Inquestor BBS started at some point in 1991, and operated for many years.  The sysop was Peter Deane, operated on an Amiga and concentrated on mail distribution.  We always had troubles paying the phone bill and finding hard drive space, but the hobby was extremely rewarding and introduced me to computers in no uncertain terms.  I used a number of software programs to get the system running (rather than an integrated package our IBM friends would have used) and ended up modifying the existing BBS code of Metro BBS (which I called OzMetro) and wrote an entire message section called Plutonic which was a powerful *.msg message editor with a number of utilities.

Three things killed Inquestor.  My move to Toukley from Newcastle, which meant my regular callers all became STD calls to the system; the rise and rise of the internet and world wide web; and (of course) the bankruptcy of Commodore Business Machines and the failure of the Amiga computer to remain with a viable user base.  As I have mentioned before, Inquestor still exists.  I will drag out the old A2000 it lives on in the next few days, and dump all the files from the hard drive via a serial cable to this machine.  With the Amiga Emulator, it might even be possible to get it running on the IBM PC, but at least if that is not possible, the message bases and text files will provide interesting memorabilia.

Old Friends Reunited!

Well, despite the best intentions, time has been the killer in posting to the blog.  Did I not promise to try posting every second day at least?  One post in the last two months has not been a good record!

One thing that has become apparent, however, is my quest to track down prior friends, acquaintances and relatives.  I have setup a website of school memorabilia at http://my.integritynet.com.au/wdgi but the problem with that is it is not interactive.  People can reference the material there, but cannot interact.

What better mechanism for providing output and a forum for input than this very blog we are looking at now?  In the next few weeks I will be publicising the existence of this site and hoping to get not only a few responses from users to me, but possibly some interaction between old acquaintences.

I'll also not stop at former schoolfriends.  In a former life, back in the late 1980s I used to run a Bulletin Board System called Inquestor BBS on an Amiga computer in Newcastle.  At one point it held a record for being the longest continually-running bulletin board in the Newcastle region.  Note how many qualifications were needed in order to assert that record!  In the early 1990s, however, two things happened.  Firstly I moved to Toukley from Newcastle meaning the number of people in the local calling area diminished substantially, and secondly technology overtook bulletin boards, and this thing called the internet seemed to become a lot more significant than the esoteric academic/military plaything it had originated from.  Our worldwide Fidonet Nodelist went from a size of well over 2 megabytes to what is now about 150k.

Hopefully we can catch up with a few Inquestor users over here as well.  If you'd like to add your comment, PLEASE DO SO.  You know how.

Incidentally, Inquestor still exists - last time I booted up the amiga last year it did, anyway.  I might see what I can lift off the hard drive that might still be useful.  In the meantime, another really useful website is http://fidonet.ozzmosis.com/ which contains a few posts even YOU may have typed!

Return of the Prodigal

I can't believe I haven't blogged since day 7 of the New Zealand Trip!  This was nearly two months ago.  For the first couple of weeks after coming back I was rather crook and didn't even turn the computer on; I started to get a little better later, but have just had so much else to do.  Looking back at the New Zealand posts everything looks really nice - some of the best looking blog entries posted here.  I can't believe they were made under such adverse conditions in hostel internet cafes!  (Mind you the Wellington one was typed up on the laptop and then cut and pasted into the blog, rather than created online at exorbitant internet access rates.  Amazingly, Wellington was the only hostel we stayed in that had WiFi internet access).

In the last couple of weeks I have been creating a commercial website, and so typing for pleasure is not what I've been looking forward to.  However that site is now getting to a decent level of completeness (finally) so I have a bit more time to myself.  I'll try to do a blog post at least every second day from here on.

I suppose I should plug the website I've created if you'd like to see what I've been doing instead of blogging.  The URL is http://www.optimumair.com.au/ and it's for Optimum Air Conditioning on the NSW Central Coast.  I'll add it to the list of my websites over on the right hand side for future reference.

Oh, by they way, I'm after any commissions for websites.  As you can see from my sites they are done in Frontpage and aren't full of magical graphical whizz-bangery.  However I do try to provide USEFUL CONTENT in a very personalised and customisable form.  I aim for a website that users will keep coming back to in order to learn from, rather than one that looks flashy but once you've seen it once or twice it serves no more purpose.

I'm cheap, too!  So if you reckon it's just about time to get your business a web presence, just drop me an email via the blog link at the top of the page, or add a comment here.

Wellington, not the Duke

Well, it’s day eight of the trip, and we are in Wellington. We have visited a LOT of the countryside so far. I think we left the blog on Day 6 at Taupo. Day 7 was at New Plymouth and now, as we said, Wellington.

On Day 6 we saw the Orakei Korako thermal pits, which were intriguing. According to the Lonely Planet, after the destruction of the Pink & White Terraces, this is the most interesting thermal field in New Zealand, and possibly the world. We saw all of it, and for $38 (each) we were ferried over across a lake via boat, dropped off and given a map. After an hour and a half walk I’d taken quite a few photos of the thermal fields, and saw a small geyser going off. This was a relief as on the day before at Te Aroha the geyser wasn’t co-operating. There is a spa operated below it which taps into the waters and seems to have zapped the life of the geyser. At least at Orakei the geyser went off, albeit only tamely.

Night 6 saw us staying at Taupo on the northern shores of a massive lake, which was the result of one of the world’s biggest seismic events. The lake just blew up, al la Krakatoa, leaving behind a massive crater which is now filled with water. Taupo is a very commercial area with vast numbers of accommodation facilities and tour operators, such as helicopter rides, para-sailing, bungee jumping and the like. However it is a remarkably beautiful area.

Day 7 saw us do the mountains of Ruapehu. This is the first active volcano I’ve ever seen. It last erupted in September 1995, and the local guides were saying it was probably due to go off again, as it had erupted in 1969, 1975 and 1988. He did resist the urge to look at his watch, but I was almost expecting him to. Apparently in a 1953 eruption, 153 people were killed. We forked out $23 each to go up a long way on two of the chair lifts, which took us a long way up the hill. It was a magic experience, and from the top we could see Mt Taranaki (Mt Egmont) which was 230km away, and where we would be staying that night. A lot of driving saw us land in New Plymouth at the Egmont Eco Lodge, which was fully booked due to the Womad festival being held there for the last three days. Apparently this is a youth Arts festival, but from the looks of those staying in the hostel, the minimum age was 55!

Today we’ve done a lot more driving, all the way around Mt Egmont via the coast and down to Wellington, which is probably about as far south as we’re going to get. We are here for at least two days.

More later. We are not finding it easy to get internet access all the time. New Plymouth’s terminals were down last night. Today, here at Wellington, which is a massive hostel, I actually have the laptop going and have wi-fi access which is pure luxury.  We're more than halfway through the holiday now, and am getting used to the hostelling to a certain extent.  The worse thing is the packing up and repacking every day.  Now we get two days in the one spot!  Luxury!!!

Foreigners, not

Well, we've been in New Zealand now for five days, and it's been heaven.  For a start everyone over here seems to pronounce "kilometre" correctly (ie killer meter) and the street signs, notices on walls and articles in papers all seem to be spelt correctly and the apostrophes are even in the correct places!

We were told New Zealand was like Australia, but just twenty years ago, and they are right.  Although today we drove through a few towns that were probably Australia FIFTY years ago!  The place we have seen so far is very rural.  However we have seen a few pockets of native bush.  Crikey, when NZ was settled there must have been a rampant effort all up to clear the land.  Of what we've seen so far, there are mainly cleared areas used for agriculture or forestry, with occasional bits of bush.  Nothing like the East Coast of Australia anyway where there are huge expanses of native uncleared vegetation.

The places we have stayed in so far are day 1, Auckland, where we landed and had the afternoon/evening.  We went up to SkyTower, which is shown here from the YHA room itself.  Not a bad view (click on the pic for a bigger image). We acclimatised ourselves on Day 1 and got slightly used ti thi uccunt.  Random vowels abound.

On Day Toe (that's how they pronounce it) we headed north and stopped at Paihia.  We saw some magnificent bits of coastline on the way.  The shot on the right here is where we had lunch.  It is an absolutely magic location, but is also home to New Zealand's sole oil refinery.  Over to the right you can see the storage tanks and the incoming ships, and in the background the unspoiled bits!!!!  They need petrol, I suppose, but maybe the refinery could have been better placed.  Speaking of petrol, it's quite different.  The oil companies set a price and it seems all the servo's stick to it.  When we arrived it was $NZD1.77.9 everywhere.  But two days later Shell and Mobil put it up to $1.80.9 and BP and Caltex to $1.82.9 so we bombed out there.  Also, it's weird.  You pull up in a servo and start putting petrol into the car, and they come out and grab the hose off you and finish it off.  We've only been to ONE self-serve station so far, and I'm not used to it  (as I was saying, Australia, but twenty years ago).

Day Three saw us at Paihia in the morning where we went on a Bay of Islands cruise all day.  The cruise was called the "Cream Trip" and goes around visiting all the islands making a few deliveries and allowing us all to swim with the dolphins if we want to.

The pic on the left is the "Hole in the Rock", which we actually did sail through in our reasonably large twin hulled cruiser.  You can't go through on all days when the swll is big, but we were lucky.  The boat ONLY JUST fitted.  The captain, who was Dutch but with a combo Dutch/Kiwi accent was quite a talented seaman, and he slipped through without a problem at all.

In the evening we travelled further North to Ahipara which is the most northerly YHA hostel in NZ.  Next day (Day 5) we started by travelling North to Cape Reinga, which is as far as you can drive in NZ (not exactly the most northerly point, but close.  It's also the most westerly point, so I suppose it's as close to Australia as we're going to get for another week and a half.

Here's the view north from the northern tip of NZ:


The maoris reckon that all the souls travel north upon dieing right up the northern tip of the country and beyond.  After all, they originally came from islands around Hawaii, so it is only natural for them to return.  Sheesh, we got bored on the three hour plane trip over from Sydney - imagine canoeing here from Hawaii...

Day 5 saw us drive for a huge distance, as once we had hit Cape Reinga we came down the highway, back through Auckland and actually made it to Hamilton.  The YHA at Hamilton was full, and we didn't think we'd make it as far south as we did so we hadn't booked.  But we did, so we stayed in a cheap motel on the north side of Hamilton.  Day Six wasn't quite as exciting, as we toured around Hamilton and it was not as interesting as the North.  However along the way we did see this interesting animal constructed from corrugated iron!  The things they do.  So many drivers were stopping for photos, the shops were doing a roaring trade.

Day 6 we've seen the largest tree of some species I can't remember (walked for miles to get there and back) and walked around a thermal springs field.  We are now at the YHA in Taupo, almost at the geographic centre of New Zealand.  Haven't got photos for today as they are on the camera still up in the room.

We took 40-odd photos on Day one.  On Day 2, 130, Day 3, 180 Day 4 only 110, Day 5 a mere 67 and today I haven't looked but it's possibly going to be three hundred.

Anyway, I have eight minutes of internet access left.  It's been a good catch up, we are nearly halfway there already.   Bye for now