Basically, technojunkie is now a further incarnation of what used to be BernieC.com. Back in December 1997, I got this bold idea to use my computer at work as a Webserver. Back then, it was running Windows 95 (albeit horribly) and I installed Microsoft Personal Webserver on it to see if it would work. It did, and it seemed pretty cool.

Around this time, I happened to download an episode of South Park. Being dumb, and having a T1 to play around with, I put a few episodes on my site. I told some friends about it, and they downloaded those episodes every now and then, but it just wasn't getting the attention (read: hits) I wanted, so I told Mr. Hat's HellHole about the page. Much to my surprise, they linked to me, and on a Monday when I came to work , I saw that the site had received 1500 hits over the course of the weekend. Damn! I knew I had hit the big time, so I kept it up.

Christmas passed, and I continued with the small-scale episodes, and then in January 1998, I registered berniec.com as my domain name. I had a pretty crappy web site, but I started carrying South Park episodes (encoded by other people such as AlRoC and Mike Friese) on it, and it was a hit. I set up a FTP server at ftp.BernieC.com and let 10 users at a time download episodes. It was always maxed out. By this time, I had converted to NT 4.0 and was seeing greater stability, but I was starting to max out the T1.

Time for some bandwidth throttling. Set to 100 Kilobytes/sec, it made sure that ftp.berniec.com couldn't completely max out the T1, but I was always maxing out my limit. Oh well, it was fun. In about a year, I managed to send out a terabyte of data.

I had a PowerMac 7600 sitting at home, and one day while looking at it, I realized that it could do video capture. Voila! Enter the BernieC-encoded South Park episodes. Until January 2000, I encoded episodes and hosted a page for them at SouthPark.BernieC.com. I shut down the FTP server sometime around April 1999 (by this time I had been running Linux since Jan. 1999), and relied heavily on mirror sites to carry my episodes, of which they did an excellent job. I have no idea how many people I served with South Park, but I got e-mails from people all over the world, and it was great.

January of 2000 was when I stopped encoding South Park. Comedy Central started going on the warpath, shutting down sites that hosted episodes, and I figured my number was soon to be up, so I promptly pulled the plug, and deleted all of my episodes. I left a lot of devoted fans in the cold, but I had to do it to save my butt, and to make Comedy Central happy. However, the time I spent encoding and distributing South Park was incredible. It was fun to share something that I was so interested in with other people, all around the world.

This brings us to the present. For some time, I had been trying to find a new domain name so that I could retire my vanity domain (BernieC.com) and finally I found it -- technojunkie.org. I can't deny it, I'm a technojunkie. And, my friends are too. So, I guess you could say I registered my obsession ;-)

Update, 3 Feb 2001: BernieC.com has been deactivated. I'm not renewing it this year, and instead I'm going to focus all my efforts on technojunkie.org. With that domain, I can offer more of my friends accounts on Zeus, and thus share what I have with them. The 3 years I had the domain were good, but it's time to move on to bigger and better things :-)

Update, 21 June 2002: Another little Web site I ran, newertech.technojunkie.org has been dismantled and decommissioned. It was originally created as an almost- complete mirror of the then-defunct Newer Technology Inc.'s web site in early 2001. Well, NewerTech is back in business so I decided there was no need for newertech.technojunkie.org and took it offline. Long live NewerTech!

--Bernie Case


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