About

About

The raw sewage name stems from its roots as a bulletin board system (BBS). Before the Internet reached its current proportions, PC users used modems to dial into other PCs to electronically communicate with others and share files. Although the raw sewage BBS was a tiny operation---one dialup node running on a 486 under DESQview---I put a lot of time and effort into making it a quality system. I drew up a lot of respectable "ANSI art" for my BBS. I also wrote custom add-on software: the BBS software was called PCBoard, and it came with its own development language, PPL (PCBoard Programming Language).

Eventually, I found enlightenment in free Unix-like operating systems for PCs, starting with Linux. I named my computer "sewage" to preserve the heritage of my bulletin board. I did a presentation for a college class titled, "Why I Use Linux". Some day I'll track it down and post it here.

While at the University of Illinois it came to my attention that I had some free webserver space available to me. I taught myself the basics of HTML and brought raw sewage to the web. In its first, second and third versions, raw sewage on-the-web was nothing more than a page of my favorite links---a glorified bookmarks page.

During the summer of 2001, I got an internship at Caterpillar. I was mostly doing web programming. I started by working in ASP, which is awful. Fortunaly, I had the power to use whatever system I wanted. So I started using PHP. Although they are conceptually the same, PHP, in my opinion, has every conceivable advantage over ASP. Furthermore, ASP's language is VBScript, where PHP has a syntax much like Perl and C. I became addicted to PHP programming, and decided it was time to make a more "substantial" version of raw sewage.

My career path has taken me away from web development, though it has remained a hobby of varying intensity over the years. From time to time I find myself motivated to add some new content on the web. Because the attention I pay to this site often wanes for long stretches, I learned the hard way about website vulnerabilities. I briefly dabbled with WordPress as a means for maintaining site content, and my site was p0wned due to my failure to keep WordPress updated with it's continuous stream of security fixes. The only solution I could see to this problem, given my infrequent usage, was to convert the site to one that is entirely static.

Contact Me

I'm old-school, use email: matthew.garman@gmail.com.