Who am I and why am I a dot com?

Location

Wausau, Wisconsin, United States of America.

Who am I?

My Name is Adrian Rinehart-Balfe. I am from England and was born in 1962 at Weston-Super-Mare in Somerset with a reasonable proportion of Irish blood in my veins. While still in England I lived most of my life in and around Portsmouth, Hampshire. The surname is comprised of Robin’s maiden name and mine. We thought about Balfe-Rinehart but it didn’t seem right.

A couple of decades back, you could have seen me walking the streets of Pompey with all manner of strange clothing and hairdos. Some might think me eccentric, while others might think me an idiot. Like I care what anybody thinks!

I have worked in various mechanical disciplines since I left school and have built custom motorcycles amongst other things. Old cars tend to be my mode of transport if not on two wheels. When not getting my hands dirty, I am usually to be found up to my neck in XHTML and CSS while the beat goes on from the stereo that fuels my other passion, music.

My life tends to be chaotic but never dull. I like it that way. Not everyone gets my sense of humour or my lateral thinking. I’m not for everybody but as long as Robin, my wife, is happy, so am I. For more info’ about our meeting, check out the Us page.

Information about the history of this site.

This site started out as a drunken idea! I was slightly intoxicated one day in early August 2000, when I came across one of those pages that lets you check availability of domain names. Next thing I knew, I was putting the credit card away and beginning my new life as a dot com! Once I had sobered up it seemed to me a little pointless to have the name but no site to use it with so the search was on for a decent provider.

I tried all the free providers first but found that space was restrictive and the ability to use my own domain would not be feasible. Added to which were all the damn adverts I would have been forced to display. A search through charging providers found a large variance in facilities provided. I eventually decided on the original host after having had it checked out by a friend in the web design business. A trip to South Georgia was looming, so I used the providers on line design tool and put together a very basic, seven page ‘piece of crap’ web site.

The journey to South Georgia proved to be in the mold of the movie ‘A Perfect Storm’. I had downloaded every html tutorial that I could find, and loaded them onto my ancient P90 laptop. For the next six days of mountainous ocean, I wedged myself in a corner of the ship’s bar and learned as much as I could. As I went through the various lessons, I put together a blank site as an exercise. Everything linked well and I thought it to be fairly presentable. Upon a brief return to dry land for repairs to the ship, I found that my original effort had disappeared from the web. Probably as a result of drunken tinkering the night before sailing! I decided to upload my little project and put a little flesh into the bare frame. A couple of photo’s were added and the resulting site has been on line since early September 2000. As you might have noticed, the site is continually evolving with more content added regularly when I get a chance. I haven’t really figured out a direction for the site yet but will over time. Until then I hope that you like what you see and promise that I will continue to develop it.

As time went on and the site grew in size, it became almost impossible to manage by hand coding everything. I started out using Movable Type for the blog but soon became dissatisfied with almost everything about it. I had stumbled across the website of Dean Allen and was watching with interest as he promised to be soon releasing a beta version of his own CMS. He released it and I switched to Textpattern as soon as I was able and have never looked back.

In 2004, Dean announced a new hosting company, Textdrive. My own hosting contract was coming to an end and having learned much more, I was finding it restrictive. I jumped ship and am now hosted at a cheaper rate with the aforementioned Textdrive. Many more options are now within my grasp and the learning has accellerated!

So there you have it, this site is the result of a drunken impulse and a sea voyage through hell and back! All the page templates and style sheets are hand coded prior to incorporating in to the two content management systems. Most of the site is run by Textpattern with the exception of the gallery which is run by Photostack. I use CMS’s so that I can spend more time working on the content.

If you have any suggestions or criticisms I would love to hear from you and will give you credit for any changes. Thanks for visiting this site and please come back regularly to check out the changes. I make no money out of your visits and promise to keep advertising at bay while I can afford to.

The Nickname – Boogenstein?
When I first reached the Falkland Islands, I found myself surrounded by guys from Scotland and Tyneside. These people have really difficult accents and I found it almost impossible to understand a word they said. At work, to prevent confusion I took to wearing an old Sony Walkman without it even having batteries. If a person with an odd (to my ears) voice came near, I would pretend to be absorbed in my music until they went away! Over time I grew to understand their accents but the name was set for good by then.

In the middle of the South Atlantic, in line with Cape Town, is an Island called Saint Helena. The Island is best known as the place where Napoleon was sent in exile. He died when a pigment in his wallpaper reacted with the tropical heat and grew a fungus that threw spores containing arsenic into the air! Most of the low-paid labouring jobs down here are carried out by workers from St. Helena, known as ‘Saints’. They have a tradition of giving each other bizarre nicknames, even going as far as to hand down the names through the generations! They didn’t coin my name but were instrumental in it’s longevity.

In those days, a Walkman was often referred to by the slang term ‘Boogie-Box’. One of the only fellow workers to come from my area and who was therefore easy for me to understand, one day said “Look at him with that ‘Boogie-Box’ on, we should call him ‘Boogie-Box Bill’”. For a stupid joke, a few people that worked with me took up his idea for a couple of days. The ‘Saints’ working nearby, heard this name and, because of it’s similarity to their odd names, assumed that this must be a Saint nickname. They immediately shortened it to ‘Boogie-Box’ and promptly forgot my real name!

Over time the name got further shortened to ‘Boogie’ and later to plain ‘Boog’ or ‘Boogs’. This is where it lies now, over 11 years later after having been mentioned in the local paper as Boogie. I was even once introduced to the Governor of the Islands with this name, only for him to say he had heard of me!

Having had this name for 4 years, one night I introduced a newly arrived friend to a potent beer from Denmark by the name of ‘Elephant Beer’. Between us we drank a whole case that night and he was suffering a great deal the next evening, when I called round. As I perched on the edge of his desk chatting, I couldn’t help notice that in the middle of a letter he was writing, in huge red letters, it said: ‘The Evil Dr. Boogenstein’! He was using this new version to explain the reason, to his wife, for his failure to phone home the night before. This name was subsequently used when I became a volunteer DJ on the British Forces Radio Station . We tested Adrian, Boog and variations on my surname, Balfe but none of them sounded right on air. However, Dr. Boogenstein had a good ring to it and seemed to match my brand of humour and the music I selected.

When I came to register a domain name for the web, I first tried numerous variations of my real name, but to no avail. I drew a blank with Boog but Boogenstein was available with all the different suffixes! I chose the ‘dot-com’ because it is so easy to remember!

So there you have it, the complete and unabridged evolution of my nickname. I am so used to being called it that I use it in on line chat rooms. It does seem to stick in peoples memories as well. In the UK my friends call me by my surname – Balfe. Here in the States my friends call me Adrian. Down in the Falklands, everybody, even the boss called me a variation of that original ‘Boogie-Box Bill’! Now that I am married and have changed my surname, who knows what I’ll be known as now! Rinehart-Balfe is a little long and difficult for the intoxicated to pronounce!

Cheers…........Boogenstein, Adrian or whatever you are used to!

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Go ahead, make my day!