HTTP Error 404   

404 Not Found.  Blast it.  What a pity.  You could always click here or here for short / long versions of Simon Beck's  cv instead.

The Web server cannot find the file or script you asked for. Please check the URL to ensure that the path is correct.

Please contact the server's administrator if this problem persists.

Oh I'm really peeved off about that.

Flamin' 'enry!

What a humungous foulup!

Hold on, wait a minute,  I'll just have a look over here...............

No, doesn't seem to be here either.   I'll just  have a quick look under there.......

Hmmmm........There's some old Orienteering maps and a smelly SN O-top

OH?  what's this?.....................

Oooo..........ermmmm....um-

AH!    This looks a bit like it..............

Welcome to
Simon Beck's wunndefull wacky Web site! (the polite version)

Click here to bypass this anti-graphics rant but in any case, please support the principle of avoiding forcing people to wait for graphics to download and never, never, feel obliged to include them just because we are led to believe it looks "professional". 

The first person I  showed my site to reacted:
"Good. uncluttered site - I mean no graphics, downloads quickly...  I hate sites where it takes ages for the home page to appear. "   

Remember, you are not always better of with something, often you are better off without something.

Good principle that: no graphics on your homepage.   Click here to read 'simple sites' article downloaded from www.  (argues in favor of simple sites on grounds of needs of portable internet devices)  

It remains to be seen whether this will mean everyone will be expected to do 2 versions of their site.  Still, don't include gratuitous graphics unless you do in fact only want to appeal to corporate users on T1 lines.  Maybe that's what 'look professional' means, only professionals ever get to look at it, everyone else loses patience and goes elsewhere.  (On the other hand, it could mean you're supposed to hire a professional to design your website instead of simply disseminating information in plain English.) 

This also applies to background music et al. Although this may sound unbelieveable to some people, there are in fact a lot of people in this world who do not actually want to listen to music on a 24 hour basis, and furthermore, many of those that do have already got it playing in the background before they start surfing the net, and far from putting them in the right mood to spend some money  (or whatever you're hoping to achieve), you'll just piss them off because it will interfere with whatever they wanted to listen to in the first place.

Also we're all better off most of the time without 'themes'  (background graphics et al that are all too easily incorporated when you develop your site from frontpage), and anything else than makes you site harder to download, harder to read, and harder to resist the temptation to indulge in a little computer rage against the scrawny 17 year old sitting at the adjacent terminal who's downloading 400k .gifs of Man U's latest star signing.  (I've half a mind to change that to a different team since they won the European cup!) "Never use themes, we were told"  (to quote one of my lodgers), "When someone recognises the theme they just realise you haven't put any effort into the site..."

Yes I know any decent browser has the option to turn off various categories of garbage, but sometimes (eg at college) the options page is disabled    (OKOK.. I admit it, at the time of writing this, surfers on my O-page get force-fed chariots of fire, but now I know it works I'm removing it at the next revision).  Would it not be simpler to just ban all internet graphics?  I've half a mind to team up with the anti-porno lobby to see if we can make this reality, only trouble is................. well actually they wouldn't let me have a credit card.   I guess people like me will just be consigned to the dropouts fringe of the web, and everyone will pooh-pooh my site because it doesn't fade in and out or go bom bom bom or slide up and down, rotate, flash, wink, wank, etc.

OK.  Maybe I'm being impatient but even with a 56k MODEM, the fastest presently available unless you go up to an ISDN line (and even that's only supposed to be twice as fast compared to the theoretical maximum of a 56k MODEM) they are still too slow, even the thumbnails are a pain.    (Actually I don't think the MODEM speed is very relevant; when your end of the web's congested, your MODEM speed isn't the limiting factor., this may be comlete bull...?)

All graphics are a pain unless you know you're waiting for something you want.  Of course I agree, graphics make a website look great and come alive, but then you're not very alive when you're waiting for them to load,  is the graphics thing not just another symptom of the contagion of idleness in our society whereby people want to look at pictures rather than read prose...?   Or is it just the world beating to Bill Gates' drum, and the gradual manipulation of society etc.... continued on pages 53 - 167.   No, it's because too many people just have to play with the latest toy that comes along then when they've found out how to write the JAVA code to get it to flash / move about / grow larger and smaller, they just have to prove to the world they can do it and force-feed it to everyone.

Graphics also force web designers to split up their sites into a larger number of smaller pages, not much more than a screenful at a go, see the way you always get right back to the start of the document when you hit the <home> key (Yes, there are still people out there who can touch type and find the keyboard a faster way to interact with their PCs!)   instead of back to the start of the line like you do in any normal word processor, indeed I bet there are web designers who work on the principle of the punters should never be expected to use the scroll bars / PgDn / mousewheel etc.  In fact, we may even see a punters' version of windows that doesn't have scrollbars and other complicated hard-to-understand concepts that aren't required on a properly designed website, then everyone will have to adopt the MS way of thinking.

So not only do you have to wait longer for pages to download, you also have to download more often.   I even suspect there are designers who deliberately try to fix it so people like me who normally have the graphics disabled can't make sense of their pages in the absence of the graphics.  Burn in hell you fiends, and I'm getting better all the time at making sense of your efforts minus your beautiful pictures (even if it does sometimes cause a sensation  reminiscent of finding your way out to the washrooms in the pitch dark in some strange Youth Hostel you've never been to before) 

Let's have some more creative technical terms to describe the internet equivalents of words such as 'tabloid', 'the sun', 'glossy brochure', what else..?    Let me see....  junk graphics,  junk jungles, logomania, ketchup mentality,

Use this site wisely.   Use it now, before the X25 gets even more congested than the M25.   

You could Click here to enter

(Since the purpose of this opening page is purely to waste your time and now you've had your time wasted you surely wouldn't want to not click since then you really would have had your time wasted waiting for this stupid useless page to load)

But on the other hand, there wouldn't be much point since you're already in.       You are visitor number   [Hit Counter]  Oh damn. My server doesn't support front page extensions so I'll never know.  Yes, the empire has struck again.

Here for some stuff about Bracknell.    Bracknell_times_letter.   Bracknell is a really nice town where there is a separate path network for pedestrians and cyclists, there are hardly any stoplights, you can park for free without having to queue and buy what you want at low prices and go home and get on with your life without being bullied into spending more than you need.  Which is why the developers (= the type of people who like force-feeding us graphics on the www) want to turn it into a yuppie centre full of expensive shops and cafes where we're all supposed to spend lots more money on stuff we don't need.

Here for Orienteering   (not very useful unless you're into orienteering, actually, come to think of it, it isn't very useful if you are into orienteering either)     Contains links to a variety of writings of mine, actually a half complete book ostensibly about orienteering.

Here for snide remarks about the road lobby,  conservationists.  (Actually these are extracts from the appendix to the book referred to above; some of the gags require a knowledge of orienteering, sorry about that.)

NOT - CONSTRUCTION - here for S.C.A.T. project   (worth a look if you want to see what saving in JPEG format can do to a nice neat simple logo...)

MORE CONSTRUCTION - DON'T BOTHER.... Don't bother clicking the next 4 links for the time being  unless you want to peruse umpteen versions of my cv in various formats...     About me              Mountain climbing             Campanology      Corporate version of this site  [construction zone, rather like Bracknell's going to be for the next 15 years if certain commercial interests get their way]   (only recommended for the patient and those with T1 lines)

Is bandwidth a scarce resource?  Or is it being increased faster than it's being used up?
Try the traffic monitoring site and decide for yourself.

Travelling pictures  Simon's pictures from Scandinavia plus a few from Spain.

  Simon's favorite websites....recommended

Now.testing.......   when I typed inthe links in the bit you can see. they were added in the html version.  But when I altered the askjeeves link that was wrong, the html version was not updated.  actually i'm still not sure it's right.

www.askjeeves.com   Great for searching for stuff
www.sustrans.org.uk.  Check out those new cycle routes. 
www.teleport.com/~walking/hiking.html    Pretty obvious what this site is about.

Ah the above was 'recognised' as a URL after I added the com to the end,  even though this is bogus.   It wasn't when it just had html on the end.  But now I've got rid of the bogus .com, it's still there as a link.  Magic, isn't it, this microsoftware.

BOF_Results (especially results of races I've won)    
O-Web  (good place for annoying orienteers)
PRS (Unbelieveable quantity of MIDI files of classical music.  Didn't get a mention in PC magazine's list of top 300 websites.   Must have been too good.  Else more likely the people who work for PC magazine don't know what classical music is.)  There have been changes to their setup recently, mirror sites etc, problems caused by people hogging bandwidth by using browser accellerators et al., I wish you luck if you want to visit the site....
Valkhorn.com - good for Rock music, JMJ (with consent!) (well, most of them are good, I was impressed.)  Not sure this site is still operational, problems with copyright etc.   Good idea to get hold of cakewalk or similar so you can tinker with the mix.  NB Watch your speakers,  you're probably OK on PC speakers, but with a domestic hifi with a better low frequency response amplifier, some of the waveforms soundcards can output are deadly.
Hotmail (Ah that's a good idea, let's send Simon a rude message...)
Simon's orienteering page  (another good place for annoying orienteers)
Bracknell Forest Borough Council   Please send a protest e-mail about the plan to demolish the town centre and replace it with a mega-mall and none of the present cheap food outlets (that are doubless a thorn in the side of the developers as they drag down prices in all the shops and supermarkets and all the people who live here can enjoy cheap housing, cheap food  (oops, let's say 'affordable'; nobody likes their town being described as 'cheap')  and generally get on with their lives without being bullied into spending more than necessary on their daily needs.  Why not visit the market one Saturday, buy some gorgeous juicy pineapples 2 for UKP1 and one or two lovely great big snow white caulis then go for a run on Star Posts, on the southern edge of the town?   Then you can visit my house and beat my brains out  if you don't like my website / newsgroup postings/ either.   No I'm not using the web to advocate violence so p*ss off if you feel that way inclined.
The Ainsworld.  Mark Ainsworth's website, like mine, full of jokes, except some of his are funny. 
Colourful sexy pictures (Free, from spanky.triumf.ca).  No need to hand over your credit card details, don't even need to be online.  (Actually it's got nothing to do with either sex or spanking, sorry about that.)

Simon's favorite grumbles about the internet:

1   Whoever was responsible for making file names and directories case sensitive should definitely go to hell when he dies.

2   This business about .htm and .html files is another cockup.  Again, like case sensitivity, why not just fix things so they're equivalent.

3   Gratuitous graphics  (I hardly need include this in the light of the foregoing!)

4   MODEMS that dial wrong numbers.  (not a very common grumble, actually, this does indeed seem to be something that only happens to me.  Why does it always go wrong with me?????  Can anyone explain why a MODEM might sometimes dial the wrong number?   Does it miss the first digit?  so instead of 0845....  it dials 845...  Well, I wondered that, so I picked up the phone and tried the correct number minus the first digit, then minus the 1st 2 digits, etc., and got unobtainable every time, but sometimes my MODEM dials thru to a private phone in someone's house (or so it sounds) and I'm getting somewhat concerned, and I shall be studying my next phonebill with considerable interest.   (Since typing the above my phonebill has arrived, 5 calls made to Bracknell 845100 instead of compuserve's  0845 1001000 or whatever it was, never mind, I'm not with compuserve any more so it's someone else who gets calles in the middle of the night when my system doesn't work.