These pages are now insanely out of date, and may well never improve. Just so you know.
Welcome to my webpages; I resisted making them for some time, but I've finally surrendered to the inevitable and put something up to provide a home for various bits and pieces - mainly my assorted fiction. Please note that I'm currently (see most "most recent update", below) suffering from a form of RSI and that information on these pages may therefore be very out-of-date.
Please feel free to skip the two-paragraph rant below; I'll be moving it into a new section soon, where it's likely to be joined by some others. Hopefully, now that I've finished moving around, I'll get around to updating the rest of these pages a little more often, too.
These pages are content enchanced. They consist almost exclusively of actual written text, and the quantity and variety of html tags used are kept to an absolute minimum. The main reason for this is simple: I keep my browser configured the way I do because that's the way I want things to look. People who try to make me read green text on a grey and purple striped background while javascript-animated bats flap around madly in the foreground annoy me. They also rarely have anything on the site worth reading; the effort put into the pretty features seems to leave them without any time for producing worthwhile content.
Increasingly this seems to be true of commercial sites as well as private ones. Clean, simple design is the way to go, people: multi-megabyte animations may look very nice, but they don't actually help anyone. Presentation is important, but it has to be good presentation. A publisher who printed a magazine with green text on purple and grey striped backgrounds wouldn't sell many copies, because no-one would be able to read it. The same principle applies to webpages: if your content is too hard to find, then you won't have an audience, regardless of how good it may be.
OK, now that I've got that off my chest, you presumably want to know what's on here. Well, there used to be an online CV (now elsewhere), and a page of general information and links (now removed, because it was remarkably out of date). There's still a page containing the aforementioned collection of various writings, although it's all very old stuff, these days. There's also a page of stuff related to Taruithorn.
If things seem a little threadbare, I can only ask: what did you expect from a few minutes' work? I have a vague hope that updates from now (March 2006) onwards will be a little more frequent and useful than previously. The most obvious change-in-progress is that I'm planning to sort out the photo gallery properly, with pictures both old and new (mainly, although not exclusively, Taruithorn-related ones); there are a few other bits and pieces I intend to give a home here, too, but I'll have to get a round tuit first, so I won't talk about them until I actually do something.