cowlark.com
![[Home]](http://www.cowlark.com/home.png) |
![[Index]](http://www.cowlark.com/index.png) |
![[About]](http://www.cowlark.com/about.png) |
![[Mail me]](http://www.cowlark.com/mailme.png) |
| Keywords |
|---|
| WWW |
| my own work |
| Links in this document |
|---|
![[IMG]](http://www.cowlark.com/image.png){kind=small} cowlark.xcf.gz |
About cowlark.com
What is this place?
cowlark.com is the personal web site of David Given. This does not necessarily mean it contains anything useful, sensible, worthwhile, coherent, or even grammatically correct. Warning: prolonged exposure to this web site may result in the loss of time which may have been more profitably used elsewhere.The site is currently hosted on plover.net, a web hosting machine run by Placet Solutions. It's cheap, fast, gives me a shell account, provides excellent service and is generally really cooli. If you want small-site web hosting with loads of flexibility on a budget, give them a try.
cowlark.com is carefully designed to be low maintenance. This means it's not going to receive a lot of maintenance. Don't watch this space.
I can't seem to work out the layout.
Most web sites are organised in a nice, sensible, hierarchical tree.This sucks.
While hierarchies may be all very well for web sites that were actually designed, for ad hoc ones like this they don't work at all well. You end up needing to update several indices whenever you change something, and as I can't abide excess work (definition of a computer programmer: someone who will go to any lengths to do things the easy way) I wrote some nifty software to manage a free-form site for me, called NearSited.
So. Every page is categorised using some keywords. (Listed in the 'Keywords' table on the left.) The index is built automatically using those keywords. By clicking on a particular keyword, you'll be taken to the list of all pages containing that keyword. Alternatively, you could just browse the master index. And as the whole lot's kept up to date automatically, there should never be any broken links!
Who is David Given?
David Given is the owner and maintainer of cowlark.com. He's a computer programmer working for the exceedingly nifty Tao Group, the makers of the even more exceedingly nifty intent operating system, about which he is exceedingly enthusiastic. He current lives and works in Reading, but not out of choice.He was born in Scotland sometime in the 1970s. Details of his early life are somewhat unclear but he is believed to have gone to a series of mildly prestigious schools. After graduating from St.Andrews University, he was forced to leave Scotland and work in the barbaric wastes of Reading.
Apart from his obvious and slightly embarassing interest in computers, he also enjoys music, science fiction, cycling (but not too far), paragliding, and a number of other things only included here to make him seem like a well-rounded individual. He is a keen filker, despite not having done it for very long, and is a novice member of the nMC (link pending).
He also keeps fish. Minnows.
Is that a cow in the picture?
Nice, isn't it?That picture took a lot of work. It's a composite of three photographs I found on the 'net, and about five hours effort with the GIMP.
And now to credit the people whose photographs I have shamelessly ripped off. The cow itself is called Star, and is a resident of Moton Elementary School, in Brooksville, Florida. It sounds like a fun place; I mean, come on, their school zoo has a cow in it. Unfortunately they've recently rearranged their web site and I can't find the zoo page any more, so I can't link to the original picture; but it's still in the Google cache, so you can find it there.
The wings came off an American Bald Eagle. This one, in fact. This comes from a page on Andean spiritual traditions.
The clouds... well, unfortunately, like an idiot I forgot to note down which page I got the clouds from. And now I can't find it again. If anyone recognises this picture:
![[Picture of clouds out
of an aeroplane window]](http://www.cowlark.com/about.dat/smallwindow.jpg)
...would they please get in touch?
All the images were found with Google Images. Damn, Google's good.
- cowlark.xcf.gz (1816267 bytes)
- The raw GIMP input file. Feel free to play with it. If you can improve the tail, please tell me!