About me

Born when AIDS were things the French teacher brought in to the classroom, and the population of humans on this planet less than half what it is today, I burst on the world in 1955. The English county of East Yorkshire had seen nothing like it before, and stirred for a whole minute before dropping back to its  slumbers. Having lived through the Andrews Sisters and Bing Crosby, I chose to flee the parental fold and joined a commune. Actually, it all started as WWOOFing (I'm not going to explain it if you don't know), but seemed an attractive lifestyle. Not least for the parties, the women and the dope. 

I lived in Australia for two years, saving for a long trip through Asia. After three years, I was still on the road, with merely a short pause in the UK to raise more money through selling my LP collection. In all this time I dabbled in making my own audio amps., camping gear and bicycles. The longest I lived anywhere was eighteen months. It was more my lack of imagination that led to this: in some ways, I like the idea of a life where I can store my books and CDs without having to box everything up every year or two, but I have never managed to plan ahead far enough to achieve this. 

About where I live

This is a view of the "centre" of Vienna which most visitors know - looking across to St. Stephen's Cathedral from Stephan's Platz.

You can get tourist information about Vienna here (in various languages), and information about Vienna's airport (transport to and from, arrivals and departures) in English here. Austrian Federal Railways' (ÖBB) tickets can be booked online and printed at home. Go here to see the English version of the timetable enquiry page and special offers for different fares within Austria and throughout Europe. If you plan to do any bus travel (trains run in only a few mountainous areas!) you'll need information on the Austrian PostBus services here.

Austria is a small (if you are American it is slightly smaller than Maine), landlocked country with extensive forests and high mountains. The highest point is the mountain called Grossglockner at 3798 metres. Just over 8 million people live here. Along with much of this part of Central Europe, Austria has problems with air pollution resulting from emissions by coal- and oil-fired power stations and industrial plants, and from trucks transiting Austria between northern and southern Europe. This has caused forest die-back in places, and acidification of soil and water. Austria has no nuclear power stations.

The winters are long and hard in the East, somewhat milder in the West, where the Atlantic airstream has more influence. Higher mountains have snow all the year, and skiing is popular on the permanent glaciers. Summers are warm to hot, and thriving vineyards are testimony to the power of the sun here.

German is the language spoken throughout the country; English is widely understood in Vienna. In the Western part of the country the dialects are very tricky to follow if you had "high" German (the regular sort) at school.

About this Web site
 

This site is currently beaming to you from a huge data centre located in Dallas, Texas, equipped with over 25,000 servers. It's the sixth home for the site in ten years, and probably to best we have had, with excellent uptime.


I began the tokezone site about ten years ago, back then hosting it on a free space provider as a bit of fun. My decision to use the handle "Midnite Toker" when posting messages on the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree travel forum led me to include the lyrics to the Steve Miller song, The Joker on the infant site. This has proved to be a very popular part of the present site, though it has little to do with anything else that's on here. I've kept the Pompitous page shunted into a siding with the current menu structure, with more emphasis placed on the travel and online privacy aspects of the site.

Aside from an odd, obligatory "powered by..." notice at the bottom of some pages, this site is free of advertising. I pay for the cost of hosting the pages on the tokezone myself and ask for no donations to support it. As you might have guessed, it's much more a hobby project than anything seriously permanent. So if you see a photo or download you like, copy it now as the site might not go on forever in this format.

I put the site together using a blend of Dreamweaver and MS Expression Web Designer as the HTML editors. My older photos were scanned using an Epson Perfection 1200 with slide scanner attachment. I'm not really happy with the quality of the scanned transparencies, but I don't want to buy a dedicated slide scanner. Photos taken since 2004 were taken with a Nikon Coolpix digital camera. Arles Image Web Page Generator did the thumbnail and photo pages. I used Trellian Button Factory (love that name) to make my buttons. Adobe Photoshop CS3 did miscellaneous image editing, Adobe Flash 9 constructed the Flash presentations, with Adobe Acrobat Pro producing the (wait for it) Acrobat PDF document. I used Pano2QTVR (both Flash and QuickTime) for the photo panoramas after stitching together 3 or more single photos with Photoshop's photomerge.

Other software that I use includes Search Engine Composer from MTOPsoft, which I highly recommended as a search engine builder for anyone's site. The tokecards are powered by the Sendcard PHP script, while WordPress - probably the most well-known PHP blogging script - does the work behind the scenes on the blog. Download Tracker manages the file downloads and LimeSurvey takes people's clicks on the survey page and converts them to meaningful data. The 'First Showing' photos use Coppermine gallery management software. I used a lot of different applications to put the cafeKlysm security software package together - contact me if you want to know what they were.
 




 

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