Lisa and I started this site back in 1997 when we finally were able to get a broadband internet connection. We hoped that we could create a place to share our interests and parts of our lives with our extended family and other like-minded people. While the various demands on our time haven't allowed us to update the site as often as we'd like, we feel that we've made a good start. If you're a family member and would like access to the private portion of the site, please send me an email and ask for the password.

Technical Information

If you're interested, the computer that hosts our web site is located in our basement. It started out as an old Pentium 166Mhz with 64Mb of RAM and about 23 gigabytes of disk space but has since been upgraded to an Athlon 2200+ with 512Mb of ram and 100G of disk space It was cobbled together out of a pile of spare parts that always seems to appear as I upgraded one computer or another around here. This machine, known as both dmz and atnetsend, acts as our firewall, router, web server and mail server. Not bad, eh?

I can hear you asking, "Why in the world would he do that?". Well, I always wanted to learn more about the internet and how web servers worked, so I decided to learn by doing: I'd run my own server. Once that decision was made, the rest naturally followed. I didn't want to spend too much money doing this, so once I had the computer put together I installed Linux, a free version of the powerful Unix operating system. Unlike the Microsoft Windows operating system, Linux has the ability to keep running for months, if not years before the machine needs to be rebooted. Atnetsend was once up and running for over 165 days straight before I shut it down to install a new hard disk.

For a web server, I chose the Apache web server because it was fast, stable, and free. Getting it running was a breeze and allowed me to play with various nifty tools such as server side includes, perl, and php. For now, though,
I've stuck with static html pages, with a few using server side
includes; there's nothing too fancy here. Next year, I plan on
replacing some of the behind-the-scenes code with java server pages (jsp pages) just to prove that I learned something in school :)