(Pete's Place was last revised: September 28, 2001)
(This Page was last revised: September 28, 2001)
Greetings, and welcome to Pete's Place! Come in out of the ether, and make yourself comfortable. You have travelled a great distance to pay me a visit, so please, make yourself at home. Hang your jacket on a peg, put your feet up, and relax.
Although all sites are typically Under Construction, this is especially true of this site at the moment! Sometime in the very near future I am planning to give the site a major overhaul, and as a consequence of this it is very likely that files will move around, and the directory structure change! By all means look around as much as you like -- but should you actually feel the impulse to bookmark something here, it would probably be an idea to bookmark this page until this warning goes away...
If you have a few minutes to spare I'll give you the official guided tour of my humble site, and then leave you to look around for yourself. If you've been here before, you might want to go straight to my Register of Recent Renovations to find out whether anything has changed since your last visit. If you want to skip the niceties altogether and go straight to what you're looking for, then feel free to take a copy of my Site Map; alternatively, make a selection from the wonderfully hi-tech menu above.
The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was.
Still with me? Okay, let's get this tour under way!
As I said before, welcome to Pete's Place! Whether by chance or by design, you have entered my little corner of that wonderful, living entity we call the 'Net! Of course, Pete's Place is currently Under Construction - like many personal sites, it is a semi-active web site which is occasionally subjected to bursts of activity, creativity, and quite possibly radioactivity; all the better to help it grow, change, evolve. Having said that, though, I'll tell you that this is a relatively safe and user-friendly construction site. There are no gaping holes for you to fall into [except for the bewildering maze of caverns that exists beneath the foundations, but all access to those areas has been, as far as I can tell, securely sealed], no piles of rubble to trip over, and most of the time the lights work too! All radioactive sources are safely and securely stored in a lead-lined vault: if your fingers start to glow in the dark, it is nothing to do with me!
Perhaps it is a waste of valuable bandwidth to state the obvious, but Pete's Place is, at least nominally, all about Pete! That'd be me: Peter Jones, at your service. From the undoubtedly thrilling account of my life story, to my various interests, to the name of my cat; everything you ever wanted to know about me but were afraid to ask can be found somewhere on this site. The good, the bad, and the mildly unsightly... Come to think of it, maybe I should only tell you the good stuff about me: after all, no-one wants to see the unsightly stuff anyway, and the bad stuff would only get me arrested!
Minds are like parachutes: they won't work unless they are open.
Someone once described this site as being little more than a self-involved diatribe
- a fairly accurate description, as far as I can tell. My response to this claim was that all personal web sites are, in one way or another, windows into the character and personality of their creators. Whether waxing lyrically about the wondrous qualities of a favourite band/show/car/whatever, or simply providing a list of favourite links, they provide insight into the author's soul! And, while I may well turn out my share of waxed lyrics and linked lists, I feel that the best way to tell the rest of the world what kinda guy I am is to just do it. None of this subtle sneaking around for me! With that in mind, why not take a peek at my Life Story?
A picture, as some wise guy once said (and as my Maths teacher persisted in quoting at us almost every day), is worth a thousand words. This is perhaps even more true on the WWW, where one humble JPG file can easily consume the same bandwidth, many times over, as a thousand words. Needless to say, I do have some pictures to show you. Somewhere on this site you'll find examples of my ray tracing skills, and samples of my photographic efforts. First, though, I guess I should let you take a look at my family album: my Rogues' Gallery, as it were!
Ultimately time is all you have and the idea isn't to save it, but to savor it.
Well, that pretty much covers the basics! But at the same time, it is only really scratching the surface; to find out what really makes me tick, you should also take a look at what I do during my waking hours. [I could tell you what I do during my sleeping hours, but there's not a lot to say about that; perhaps I could tell you about some of my dreams, but that is possibly more than you could ever want to know about my twisted inner psyche!] So, without further ado, let's take a look at what I do; both at work, and in my spare time. As you'll see, many of my interests actually involve sitting still for long periods of time, preferably doing absolutely nothing. Occasionally, however, I manage to produce something - on my own time, of course; at work I just never stop churning out the goods! [Hi there, Boss! Fancy seeing you here... :D] So, let's see what I can achieve when my Creativity takes over...
It seems that no self-respecting web site these days can be considered complete unless it has a great list of links to the outside world! Indeed, some people have been known to suffer withdrawal symptoms if they are not provided with a means to leave a site as rapidly as possible in their continuing search for newer, better lists of links. To these people, for the sake of completeness, I humbly present the following choice: take a look at my Favourite Links; or visit the homepages of my Online Friends. Who knows, you may find something, or someone, that interests you!
Well, those of you who are still with me: I salute you! As you have quite possibly already discovered, Pete's Place has a wealth of text for you lovers of content to wade through. It has a few pictures to look at, sure, but that hardly makes it a flashy multimedia site! If you have worked your way through my site - or even if you have kept up with me this far, resisting all urges to deviate from this page - you deserve a special reward. No, not money: you in the back there can put your piggy-bank away again! I give you no less than that most sought-after of all rewards: the Meaning of Life itself.
It's amazing where you can go with a completely false premise.
So, here we are at last. The end is in sight - more or less! I guess there is a possibility that, having come this far, you are scratching your head in bewilderment and wondering how you'll ever manage to find all the changes that have been made since your last visit. The answer to this question is, of course, the Register of Recent Renovations - commonly referred to as the What's New? page.
There is also the possibility that you may wish to contact me. Did you like my site, or hate it? Did you find something marvellous on here, something that will change your life; or did you merely trip over a broken link? Did you find anything that did not work with your browser? Were you interested enough in my site that you want to be kept informed of any large changes I may make? Perhaps you wish to view my guestbook - or even sign it yourself? Maybe you even want to find out whether I am online at this moment, and say Hello
? Well, that's easy: every single page here at Pete's Place has a link to my email address at the bottom!
Finally, as I mentioned earlier, these pages are still in flux: growing, evolving, mutating - albeit slowly at times... As they say, change is the only constant!
So pop in again some time, just to see if I've actually gotten around to changing anything. The door will be open - and the lights will be on!