Information

Welcome to the information page of the Variety Network. Located on this page is information about the Variety Network administrator, as well as a brief description of the various resources the Variety Network has available for use.
The page is broken up into sections which are indicated by headings of level two.

The Variety Network Administrator

This is probably one of the few sections of the web page that will be written in first person and reflect the less logical side of my personality at times, so please, enjoy it while you can!
Now, on to the information about me.

Compared to other websites, this one doesn't offer too much, but the resources are diverse. Why do I host a website, you might ask? That answer begins at practically the beginning of my life. Before I start with the recall of my life which may be inaccurate in places, you should know that my long term memory isn't all that reliable. For the most part, though, I'd have to say that what I say is fairly accurate, as I try and keep things rather broad.

My name is Blake, I like computers, and it all started when I was very young. The first peace of technology I ever used what a device called the Braille 'N Speak. It was developed by Blazie Engineering, if I recall correctly, but that's not all that important. What is important is the first computer of my own that I received somewhere around the year 2001. Back then, I couldn't type all that fast compared to now, so I was less than eager to use the computer for fun. Since it's been about eight years, I don't feel guilty for saying that much of my computer experience was made in some of my middle school classes, though there wasn't much else I was doing in them at the time. My interest peaked slightly when I was given access to the dial-up internet connection my parents had at the time. It had its limitations, so I didn't stay on for long periods at a time.

Things started looking up for me when my parents decided to get Comcast internet. As multiple people could be on the internet connection at one time, I could be on the internet for long periods at a time. The facts that the phone lines stayed free and the internet was far superior in speed than the dial-up internet was, allowed me to remain on the computer for hours at a time without getting bord.

At first, I only downloaded programs for the Braille 'N Speak, a device that I still enjoyed the use of. Later on, though, I got introduced to a web site called for-the-people, and was introduced to how diverse the blind community was. I was surprised at first to learn that there were far more people like me than I realized, though after a while, it was simply part of every day life.

Eventually, my family moved from our previous location to another. My parents wanted a bigger house to live in, as they thought my sister and I needed bigger rooms. I was able to have a computer in my room, which I had never done before. Though I didn't have an internet connection for a period of time until we got DSL, that didn't bother me. That rather large, old, and loud computer with a 500MHZ processor, 128MB of ram, and 10GB of disk space was all I needed. By the way, that computer is long gone.

I don't recall who told me how I could access my router and forward ports on my computer, but from that point on in the wonderful year of 2005, I began hosting servers. I started with a shoutcast, then put up a ventrilo server, and once I got a web page going, I set up a domain through dyndns.com, a free service that will let you host subdomains of certain domain names. I bet none of you remember the domain bamn.dyndns.org, which probably doesn't work anymore. At the time, bamn stood for The Blake And Melissa Network. At the time I set up the domain, my sister and I thought it would be fun to start such a network. Unfortunently, it didn't end up going anywhere.

From there, I learned more complex languages other than html, which is the language most web pages use in combination with other languages such as java, javascript, php, perl, python, and others. Some languages I delved deeply into, but others, I didn't.

I eventually came up with the domain vrnw.dyndns.org, the vrnw part of it standing for Variety Network. I thought it made sense as I'm hosting a variety of resources on my server, and still think it does. I have no idea why, but I decided to get a domain through no-ip.com, which was vrnw.no-ip.org. It's a similar service to dyndns.com. Both domains are, as far as I know, inactive.

During this time, I hosted my servers on the same computer I used daily. To add insult to injury, (always assuming that you took that as an insult and take my next statement outside the parenthesis as an insult, and believe me running my servers on the same computer I was using as an injury), the computer crashed quite a bit, probably because it was running Windows along with all the server applications needed. Usually, I restarted the computer quite a bit during the weeks, so the servers would go up and down. Eventually, I got my servers running on a separate windows system, which was better on resources for the server computer. Once I started attending the Ogden Weber Applied Techknology College, I gained an interest in Linux quite rapidly. As the Linux operating system took up far less resources, I once again moved my servers over to that particular operating system. it was somewhat harder, as I had to download new binaries, and in some cases, reconfigure the servers to allow me to do what I wanted with them.

For two years, I ran my servers from my home internet connection using free domains. That setup worked well for me most of that time, until my internet connection became more unstable than it was. As I didn't think anyone was accessing the servers and their resources, I started experimenting, putting them down and up again, though left the IRC server that I had put up in 2009, as it was linked to another. It didn't help much, so I began getting interested in other resources I could use. It leaves me using a virtual Linux server at www.vrnw.org.

At first, I coded my entire website by hand, something I may end up doing in the future. However, I've begun playing around with Drupal and thought it a far more vercitile framework than what I was using. I decided to switch from what I was using to Drupal's framework, and here the new website is. It probably looks nicer, too.

Now that I'm done telling you how I got where I am today, you may or may not wish to note my self-description below.

I'm usually a logical, calm individual. Even under emotional stress, I usually can think objectively and rationally, a quality that has helped me greatly in the past year. Because of my annalitical and logical method of thinking, I sometimes have difficulty understanding jokes. Most of them are a play on words, and many that I've heard don't make any logical sense. Usually, I don't act on my emotions, so I might not tell you how I feel when you're talking to me. I'm hard to offend and anger, though, and I think my accepting and open mind helps me in that aspect of my personality. I have been described as intelligent and smart by others, but I'm rather modest when it comes to my talents with computers and operating systems. My humor is logical in nature, and just as I don't understand other people's jokes at times, they may not understand mine. One of my friends described me as having the patients of a saint, a statement I still don't understand. Another friend of mine said that I have a Vulcan quality to me. Vulcan's are an alien species from Star Trek, who suppress their emotions and whose logic is the foundation for their society. That sounds similar to me in some ways, but I'm most definitely not a vulcan. I'm a human being, and it would not be logical for me to change what I am. There's a joke in there for all you Star Trek fans, though others of you might get it, too.

That ends that, everyone. Enjoy the rest of the site!

Server Resources

The Variety Network is currently running its servers on a virtual Linux server known as a Linode. At the moment, our bandwidth transfer rates are limited to 200 Gigabytes a month, though the transfer rates probably won't get that high yet. The servers we are running are as follows:

• TeamTalk version 4.1, for voice chatting.
• UnrealIRCD, an Internet Relay Chat server for chatting live with anyone who chooses to talk.
• Icecast version 2, an audio broadcasting server.

For more information about the servers that are run, check out the servers page.