FAQ

You’re looking at it.

Well, first and foremost, it is my personal wiki, running atop a custom engine where I jot down some technical notes and (of course) my blog posts and commentary on topics/links of interest. It looks like a regular weblog, but that is mostly for the average visitor’s convenience.

No big articles, no in-depth discussions–just a digital scrapbook on steroids with a lot of notes (many of them historically related to the telco market), short (and hopefully clear) articles and the odd opinion piece.

Well, because the site’s creation mostly coincided with my buying a Mac, and using it was a lot like Taoism: It just happened, and things things just (mostly) worked. They still do, even though it’s now been over two decades since the site got started and I’ve used pretty much every platform under the sun (pun intended).

What is Tao?

Enlighten yourself. You can also buy a “personal enlightenment kit” at any supermarket (hint: look for the flashlight section).

Why the Mac?

At the time, the Mac was different, shiny and an enticing mix of power and polish–this was around 2002, when other computing environments weren’t as sophisticated. “Switching” was popular, and I even wrote a guide on it, but as it turned out I kept using other platforms (and even joined Microsoft in the meantime).

At the time of this writing (2023, after the COVID pandemic) the OS has become somewhat irrelevant, although I still prefer the Mac for many things and run all my online services on Linux.

In the end, arguing about computer platforms is like arguing about cars–it’s both a matter of personal preference and convenience, and one size does not fit all.

In Lisbon, Portugal. Although I’m often asked if I want to relocate elsewhere (and have friends scattered around the globe), I like it here, and so does my family.

If you’re asking that question, then you’re probably Portuguese yourself.

The short answer is: Because I spend half my waking hours thinking, writing and speaking in English, and have done so for most of my adult life.

The long answer involves explaining in rather painstaking detail why I don’t subscribe to the usual navel–gazing attitude that was the hallmark of Portuguese bloggers for many years (usually along the lines of “if foreigners want to read my stuff, they can stick a fish in their ear”), which stems from our nation’s peculiar form of nostalgia for the imperial days and prevents us from making any sort of headway into the modern world.

The even longer answer includes a statement to the effect that I did, in fact, write in Portuguese, and still do–just not here, where I take notes on tech stuff that is of general interest and don’t want language getting in the way.

Why a Wiki?

Because it’s better than a traditional weblog. It makes it substantially easier to jot down down notes on interrelated concepts and makes it easier to find related items even if you don’t know all the relationships.

Plus it’s probably the oldest way to publish content out there (no matter what “Internet historians” and journalists say), and–most importantly – it is, conceptually, the simplest thing that could possibly work.

Yes, it was. Not being a platform zealot in any sense (I use Windows, Linux and macOS), I thought it peculiar to be put upon when I decided to switch to the Mac at home, and at the time it was somewhat risqué to switch.

Aren’t you the guy that ran/wrote/coded/did/sold/designed (whatever)?

Yeah, I’ve been around for a while. I used to run an online games site called accao.net, kept a Portuguese weblog at na-cama.com before the domain was picked up by scammers and became NSFW (when it started, it was owned by a writer co-op), worked for a few consulting outfits and integrators, did quite a lot of online projects and contributed small snippets of code to quite a few Open Source projects in my leisure time.

Last time I bothered to check, a few FreeBSD and ISDN posts circa 1994 were still archived somewhere, and I have an e-mail archive from 1990 or so with VAX/VMS and even some DECNET stuff in it…

Definitely not. around 95% of what happens on this site is related only to my off-work pursuits. I also don’t maintain the site for profit (when I ran ads, they didn’t even cover hosting costs, they were more of a way to keep in touch with the current state of affairs in advertising).

Pretty much everything you see here is the result of a few minutes a day keeping tabs on current technology or noting down some of the things I do in my spare time. If I did this sort of thing for a living, I’d probably blog about Fine Arts or something.

I do use the site to store some interesting information that I come across during work, but nothing of real consequence to what I do. And that’s where this little bit of text comes in.