About Us




Adam and Ruth 01 December 2007

Table of Contents





Who we are

We are a middle-aged couple who live in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. We have a great time together doing interesting things, or at least things we think are interesting. They may be dead boring to other people.

Ruth is a graduate of Queen's University and Adam is a University of Manitoba alumnus.

Ruth has three kids: Matt, Rachael and Nick. They come to visit fairly regularly and so photos of them appear often on this website, in our news items.


About the contents of this website

This website first appeared on GeoCities in early 2001. It started because we wanted to have a place to post photos for friends and relatives, rather than e-mailing large files around to them.

Fairly quickly we added recipes that we found, modified, invented or got from friends. We started a jokes page as a place to post all those forwarded jokes that everyone gets, or at least what we thought were the best ones. We also added a page for some of Ruth's paintings and animations. We also have a permanent collection of photos. Most recently we have added the first of our free books, please feel free to download them!

Aside from those more permanent items, we also post pages on recent things that we have done, holidays, trips and such. These are all linked from the home page. We also use the home page as a collection of links to friends' websites, other websites we have created, interesting websites that we like and free software websites, too.

We originally called the website "More Spooge" because the Geocities name "Spooge" was taken. Spooge means many things to many people, but in this case it mostly means "junk and other unsorted garbage".


Technical stuff about this website

When we started this website in 2001 we didn't know much about creating websites, but we have learned along the way. Most of the time our website has served as a learning "testbed" for web techniques. That may account for the rather "experimental" look to it at times. It changes a lot and we regularly add things to it.

When we started out, it was written on MS Publisher 97. Yes, believe it or not you can do that! Over time different versions of this website and our other websites have been written on Publisher 2000, MS Word 2000, MS FrontPage 2002, MacroMedia DreamWeaver, Mozilla SeaMonkey, NVu and KompoZer. Whew!

Today this website is entirely coded in XHTML by hand on the Ubuntu operating system using gEdit. We have a page about the hand-coded XHTML project. Writing XHTML by hand is so easy, fun and gives so much control, that we wouldn't go back to anything else at this point.

This website was originally located on GeoCities from April 2001-December 2007. On December 13th, 2007 we moved it to our new ISP, National Capital Freenet.

In April 2008 we moved three more of our websites to NCF. These are:


Computer Stuff

Adam wearing Ubuntu t-shirt

Over the years we have had a lot of involvement with computers. Adam started working on an IBM mainframe in 1978. Some of the programming was run on cards back then! Later in the 1980s he worked on a DEC mainframe and even had e-mail in 1988!

Ruth's first computer was a Commodore 64. She later had an Amiga, before moving onto Windows 2.0.

Our first PC together ran Windows 3.1 and we have also used Windows 95, 98 and XP before moving to Ubuntu Linux.

We don't use Windows Vista or Windows 7 as those compromise your personal freedom, instead we have upgraded to Ubuntu. For details on that see The Ubuntu Diaries.

We have a few small computer projects on the go these days. These each have their own diary pages that describe them in detail:


Some Thoughts on the Internet

I should add one more note on the subject of websites and the internet in general.

Overall I think that the internet has a problem - too much "glitz and technique" and not enough useful content. There is a tendency to post anything, regardless of the quality, since it is easy to do. Flash-based websites are probably the worst.

I really believe that no matter what technology you are using to create web pages (especially if you are amusing yourself hand-coding pages like I am) webmasters have to remember: The internet should not be about the "technology", it should be about "content". The technical aspects are just a means to get the content read. If the technology detracts from the message or the information, then it doesn't work. The worse case is where a website has no real content and all you get are animated GIFs and useless Flash animations instead of actual information.

This website is just our own personal stuff, but we try to make sure that the writing is clear, the recipes work and the jokes funny. Even "personal media" like this ought to be worth reading. If not then feel free to change the channel.

I hope that we have met our own standard here.


Some Things We Are Into

Here is just a list, in alphabetical order, of some things that we like, do, or generally support:

Adam and Ruth quadracycling

Jobs We Have Had

Over the years we have each had some interesting jobs, so we thought we would put together a list here.

Adam

Ruth
  • Helicopter Pilot
  • Infantry Officer
  • Peacekeeper
  • Search and Rescue Pilot
  • Medevac Pilot
  • Forest Fire Fighter
  • Psychotherapist
  • Journalist
  • Association Manager
  • Pizza Driver
  • Lab Assistant
  • Flight & Ground School Instructor
  • Psychotherapist
  • Stay-at-home Mom
  • Newspaper Advertising Sales Manager and Designer
  • Support Group Facilitator
  • Air Cadet Instructor
  • Retail Cashier
  • Before & After School Care Supervisor


E-mail Us

Contact

Send us an e-mail: E-mail Us

Adam and Ruth 21 July 2007




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