This is a personal site, geared towards my friends, family, and colleagues. You're welcome to read and comment. I reserve the right to delete comments for whatever whimsical reason I may have.
I block IP addresses which I believe are the source for link spam, hack attempts, or otherwise are the source for what I deem bad behaviour.
This site is not a public accommodation.
History
I have had some sort of online presence since 1989. From 1989-1994 you can find traces of me in various USENET newsgroups. My first personal site was off the old netcom.com FTP servers. Eventually I set up a homepage at http://www.ibm.com/~epc when I was IBM's webmaster (it's semi-archived here). This site is a followup to those earlier sites, as well as to http://epc.editthispage.com/ and http://home.earthlink.net/~epcostello.
Operations, Design
The style is as plain as possible, little or no graphics, using CSS for layout. I use vanilla CSS2 markup as much as possible. I test the site using Firefox, on Mac OS X and Windows XP, and Safari on a Mac. I do not use Microsoft Internet Explorer as I have better things to do with my time than install bug patches.
I’m not a web designer, have never wanted to be one, never claimed to be one, and avoid it as much as possible.
I use PHP, Movable Type and MySQL for various things. The site is hosted by Pair networks.
Content should be valid XHTML, but is served as text/html because, for now, I have better things to do than try to sift through all the problems caused by serving as application/xhtml+xml, or content negotiating between HTML and XHTML. I think the CSS is valid as well. If it isn't, it isn't.
Some links on the site will route through an affiliate program, eg amazon.com for books and audio, Pair.com for hosting recommendations, and possibly Apple's iTunes affiliate program if I figure out how to code something automagic for it.
Personal technology
Most of my day to day work is done using an IBM Thinkpad x31 running Microsoft Windows XP on an IBM Thinkpad x31, FreeBSD on various systems, and OS X Panther on an ancient Apple Macintosh G4. I use JASSPA MicroEmacs for editing, and occasionally MS Word. I use Firefox for most web browsing on both Windows and OS X. I use Cygwin on Windows to at least feign a Unix-y setup, including rxvterm and ssh. For now, I do mail using Microsoft Outlook XP.
I currently use Vonage VOIP service as well as Skype. The quality of both services is decent as long as your bandwidth remains constant. I've had problems with Vonage when the available bandwidth drops suddenly during a call (no, that's not surprising, it's just something to be aware of). One feature from Vonage I especially like is the ability to have voice mail emailed to you. This has made it easier to for me to keep up on phone calls while I'm away from the house.
This site, and others I build and maintain, is hosted by Pair Networks. No complaints, decent hosting and service for small to mid-range web sites.