Bastard Sheep

Who I am:

By day I am a mild mannered IT guy from Sydney providing a combination of technical engineering, administration and support to clients.  By night I am Bastard Sheep: Agnostic Atheist, Skeptic, consumer of fine wines and coffees.

What to find here:

As with most people I occasionally find a little something burning up inside me, something that I need to get out, and hence this blog was born.  It’s my little land of venting.

I cannot promise what is posted here will be well thought out and concise.  In fact, it’s probably more true to say the opposite.  Regardless, all opinions and words are purely that of my own and in no way shape or form represent anybody else or any other entity whether it be my employer or groups I associate with.

Why “Bastard Sheep”:

In the mid-90′s prior to my family getting internet access my brother and I used to dial up to BBS’s (Bulletin Board Systems) instead.  These offered much the same functionality as the internet but with smaller more local communities and ASCII rather than image-rich pages.  There was online chat (similar to IRC), pages (Direct Messages), file download sections, forums, newsgroups, games (dungeons) and more.

Most forum software didn’t allow the variety of personalisation people are used to today, they remembered little more than ones name.  If you wanted your own signoff or signature, you had to set up a macro under one of the function keys on your keyboard.

My brother and I had our own computers but shared the dial-up modem.  One day I decided I couldn’t be bothered crawling around under the desk and moving the modem to my computer to call a BBS so instead jumped on my brother’s computer.

Upon entering the forums I would read a message, hit ‘r’ to reply, look down at the keys as I typed up my response (I was still learning to touch type), hit my signoff macro, ‘/s’ to save and look up to read the next message.  Repeat this a few times – read looking up, ‘r’, look down and type, macro, ‘/s’, look up and read.

On one message, I looked up a little earlier than usual and something caught my eye.  My signoff wasn’t quite right.  Isn’t it meant to be in colours?  I stopped the search for new messages and went in to a subforum I had just posted in and upon finding the message I just posted the panicked realisation set in.  This was my brother’s computer, not mine.  That function key wasn’t my signoff macro.  So what was it?

I had just signed off 10-15 forum posts as “bastard sheep”.

Before I could compose myself and start searching for these posts to correct the error, a few pages (direct messages) came through on my screen.  It was too late, others on the BBS had already seen this.

From that day on I have been affectionately known as Bastard Sheep.  Fortunately most of the people online to see this I considered friends, in fact the plush sheep you see in my avatar was actually a little something I received from these very same people on my following birthday.  I never did get a decent explanation from my brother as to why he had that macro set to “bastard sheep”, though.

Real name?:

When I started going online in the BBS days it was drilled in to me to always use a pseudonym – always protect your real identity as you never know if the person on the other end is who they say they are, or in the slightest bit trustworthy.  These days things have changed and it is becoming quite rare for people to use pseudonyms, however due to the prevalence of businesses, recruiters, and professional groups to search for peoples names in google and facebook I have kept the pseudonym going.  This is my blog, my twitter stream etc and they are my personal life, not my professional. My personal life is irrelevant to my professional, and vice versa. You will not find any crossover here.

Contact:

Email: bastardsheep at gmail dot com

Wave: bastardsheep at googlewave dot com

Twitter: @bastardsheep

Skype: bastardsheep