Chunder Blog

Chunder has moved! Chunder was originally hosted by Simplenet - the relationship was professional and amicable. They even had Technical Support - you could talk to a human being and they would listen. Then, oh schlock oh horror, they were bought by Yahoo. (brucee reaches for the OED.)

Well it was all downhill from there. They froze/crippled the service such that if we wanted to change even the slightest detail of the service we either had to downgrade or pay pay pay. The final straw was when they decided that they weren't making enough money from us simplenet folk and downgraded us to "Web Starter Packages" which we could upgrade to something approaching the service we had for a few thousand dollars a year. Then came the icing on the cake. I can't even cancel my account with them because I'm not recognized as the Primary Contact by their Webconsole "I really want out guys" form.

E-mail volleys with their crack Customer Care team continue. Anyone in the room not understand the sentence about Primary Contact? Well so far neither Trina nor Andrew do. I have been given the option of canceling via FAX or snail mail, and today via e-mail - if I can find out who the Primary Contact is that they have on file. Maybe it's First_Name Last_name - I didn't try that. Anyhow, they suck. Been to Yahoo lately? I need pop-ups like I need a strap-on. Legal

The new hosts of Chunder.com provide all sorts of goodies that computers have been doing for years but seem out of the reach of your average 14 year-old Webmaster. Amongst their weaponry is SSL (or more precisely the https protocol - HTTP secured by SSL) which will allow me to securely sell Things You Don't Need or host a MUD like The World, from back in the hippie days, with a diminished chance of cheating. I've obtained a X.509 certificate from Éclipse totale de Soleil du 11 août 1999 (get root certificate) and now I'm as secure as a peniche! The goofy thing is that some browsers (notably Netscapé 4.7 and of course Opera For Martyrs) barf on my certificate because they don't understand the UTF8String ASN.1 tag - rather anglo-centric if you ask me. On reflection I predict two meltdowns that will really annoy websters. The first is the Y2.004K problem - it is mandatory for X.509 certificates issued after 31st December 2003 to use UTF8String - and the Y2.05K problem - where the UTCTime times used in most certificates revert to 1950. In any case enough of this technical tool-waving. On with the show!

News Flash! I love the OED. Well that's not the news flash - the marvelous information about the earliest recorded literary references to chunder IS and makes it worth the $3,000.00 (though amazon has it on sale for $995.00). Notice how Nevil develops the spelling in his second use. The Private Eye doesn't deal a bad off-spin either.

	Finally getting some *Paris 2001* pics under control.
Including Restaurant Roger La Grenouille

Stoked! Well I'm stoked, fully. In fact I'm majorly full-on stoked. Aussie speed skater Steven Bradbury pulls out the big one in what can only be described as a total debacle. Good on him! And in his interview with the press he managed to use "heaps" and "stoked" in consecutive sentences and rounded it off with another "stoked" right at the end. Not only that but the Bunnies are back - the mighty Rabbitohs - with a 20-20 showing against the Dragons in the Charity Shield. Zel will be most impressed and Bones can once again wear the proud red and green. Stoked! And of course a second medal, "Gold Medal for Stoked Little Aussie Battler" was awarded at Club Birriga - top job Stevo!

Stoked! One can only get so stoked in one week. But how about this pic of "Snotty Scotty and the Hankies"! I tell you - another night, nothing to do - go on downtown, change attitude! The only two dudes I know of with the tunes are STN and Richard "Matey" Purdue ... and one is in Washington State and one cooking up fine stuff in Sydney I guess.

Some of Byron Bay (and Canberra) never survived the Kombie onslaught. Update!

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