"Frequently" Asked Questions
Q. So who are you, anyway?A. You'd think the site's title would have given that away. But yeah, I'm the webmaster of nivan.net/mutantboy.com and nevira.net, an ex-student of the University of Kent at Canterbury, and/or a fish farmer.
Q. What did you study at Kent?
A. Computer Science! And all I got was this
Q. Any hobbies apart from computer stuff?
A. My god, no! I mean, cycling, reading, and cooking.
Q. What's with the name "Nivan", anyway?
A. It's just a word I made up. If I ever get a book out, it'll be the name of a planet/continent/country/county/town/house/and-so-on.
Q. What about Nevira? A. Likewise.
Q. u smel
A. i want net
Q. Huh?
A. "u smel. i want net" is what Baz suggested I e-mail Kent's Computing Services when their intranet went down for a while.
Q. How long have you had a website for?
A. Since around 1998. I'm sure if you google enough you'll find an old lycos version of the original. Oh, what the hell. It's here. You'll hate it, I warn you! The next version up was here. You'll probably hate that too, but at least I wrote the HTML myself that time. Then it went under various permutations to get to where it is now.
I've owned Nivan.net since 03/08/2002, and Nevira.net since early one morning on 14/06/2005. Those dates are dd/mm/yyyy, since I fail to be from America, and also because there fails to be a fourteenth month.
Q: What languages do you know?
A: I have an AS Level in German and a GCSE in French, but I haven't speaken either for years. I can still understand a fair amount of German, but my French is very scratchy.
But nobody who's going to be visiting this site wants to know about real languages. Webwise, I've learnt HTML, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a bit of PHP. In terms of Real programming languages, I've been taught Java at Uni, and I did my final year project in C. I'm keen on Python, and I suppose I should put BASIC here for a cheap laugh too. No, I don't know Perl or C++, although I can generally understand the gist of it. Maybe I'll learn some day!
Q. What Operating Systems have you used?
A. I think a quick list in chronological order would be useful here!
- AmigaOS back in the early nineties on my Amiga Commodore 500C (I think)
- Well, I used an ancient BBC machine at primary school, but I don't remember how to use it so I guess I can't really put that
- RiscOS, also on a school computer (1995). I found all the games on it, including a rather nice Flight Sim. Made me popular with my classmates for a little while. My teacher that year called me The Computer Nut.
- Windows 3.11, both on my Dad's laptop, and my local Scouts group's computer
- Windows 95 on my family's first PC
- Windows 98 on my family's second PC
- Windows NT on my Dad's laptop
- Windows XP on my laptop
- Debian sarge on my geeking computers for a while
- ... and currently I run Debian sid on all my machines.
Q. And which of those have you crashed?
A. All but the first three! In addition to that, I've also seen crash a Nokia 5210 (on a holiday in Suffolk... had to remove the battery and reinsert it before getting any response), a Sega Megadrive (while cheating on Sonic 2), and probably a few other things.
Q. Bye!
A. That's not a question. Stop messing with my head.
Last Modified: Monday, 03-Jul-2006 14:45:03 BST