About

About Wintermute


Hi, my name’s Wintermute. Well, not my real name, but my handle, anyhow. Here’s a little about myself: I’ve been blogging, on-and-off, since before it was even a term. I had written a tiny little php script somewhere around the year 2000 or so which allowed me to simply add entries to the main page of my site. It did not let me edit (unless I downloaded the entry, edited it, and re-uploaded it via ftp) or allow comments, but I think it still counts. Also, much later in the game, I wrote for a couple of Linux blogs and actually got paid for it. Hey. 20 bucks is 20 bucks. I did not say I got paid much for it ;) Also, I’m a huge fan of Douglas Adams. So much so that when I discovered h2g2.com in 1999 or 2000 (I think. It was before the beeb took over. They’ve since sold it back off) I immediately signed up to become a “researcher.” My researcher number is 156736, and I still log into the site every now and then. I’d consider myself a hoopy frood who knows where his towel is. It goes without saying that I’m also a fan of William Gibson.

About Nitemare Cafe


Back in February of 1991, I started a part-time BBS on my sister's PC. After some time, she decided she wanted to run her own board, so I shuttered mine and reworked it for her with a new name, promoting her to sysop and demoting myself to "technical advisor," which was a title I had on a couple of other local boards at well.

In 1992, there was an anthology series on TV which starred Robert Englund called Nightmare Cafe. I absolutely loved that show, but it was ended after six episoded due to a writer's strike.

Part of being the technical advisor for a BBS means writing mods and scripts, and since I was technical advisor for more than one, I wrote a *ton* of mods and scripts. Since all the boards I held this position on ran the same software, I ran a local copy myself in order to test things. Not all of the sysops for the boards I worked with wanted everything I wrote, making all of them distinct from each other, but my local copy of the software was extremely heavily modified. One day, a friend I had made from the boards asked me if I could put my local copy online so that we could chat, but I needed a name. So, remembering the TV series but misremembering the spelling, Nitemare Cafe was the name I chose for the BBS, which ran for many years during the 90's. When it was time to register a domain name because the Internet was taking off, nitemarecafe.com was the first thing I thought of. I occassonally set the BBS back up as a telnet-only system at telnet://bbs.nitemarecafe.com:2002 for anyone who's interested. It may or may not be available at any given time, based on my nostalgia ;)