BH is my IRC nickname, it stands for BoilerHead. My real name is Henry, but
I'll answer to just about anything as I have had a myriad of computer aliases
for over a decade now :)
I occasionally get asked for a home page URL and despite owning an ISP for over
4 years I never really made my own personal home page. My first home page was
really just a railfan page which turned
into a whole network of railfan pages, but it didn't have anything about me or
any pictures of me.
So, I decided to finally make a small page so my friends in IRC and on the
internet could find out more about me.
I was born August 31, 1961. Not sure if that makes me an old fart yet, but I
sure don't feel like one. I help run the Blue Moon Internet Corp
which is our ISP business and Railfan.net
which is a network of railroad/railfan related websites.
I also help run two IRC networks. ZUHnet IRC
which is a successful network of public Internet Relay Chat servers which I helped to
create in 1998 and XWorld IRC for which I
provide the core network services and technical work. I provide the Buffalo, NY
IRC servers for both networks.
I was a mischievious youth and a troublesome teenager. Boy do I have stories to
tell about those times, but that will have to wait for later. In my 20's I
worked for the family business, Stritt & Priebe, which is an indusrial
piping supply corporation. The family work ethic was start at the bottom and
learn everything you can before you move up. In other words they were slave
drivers! I ended up being the manager of the industrial instrumentation end of
the business meaning I sold and took care of temperature and pressure gauges
and all the associated support systems for them. Very technical, boring stuff,
but lucrative. After Dad sold his interest in the business to my uncle
(tossing away all my sweat equity!) I sort of floated around doing all sorts
of things I knew how to do for money. I wasn't poor, but I lacked direction.
Thus begins the latest chapter in my life.
I have always had an aptitude for computers. In 1972 (6th grade) I used a school
mainframe to play games and write a few BASIC programs, nothing interesting,
but in 1972 there weren't many people who could do _anything_ on a computer.
Aside from PONG and an Atari VCS I didn't do much with computers until after
1980 when we got an Atari 800 system, our first "real computer." I mostly
played games, but that whopping 48K of memory was just too much power not to
mess around with programming! The Atari 810 floppy drive was problematic from
the start and the number of breakdowns finally discouraged me enough to stop
using the computer very much and I fell back into a routine of partying much of the
time and paying a lot of attention to girlfriends, you know, productive stuff
like that!
After a few more years of that we got an Amiga 500 computer to play games on.
That was in 1989. I got a call at work one summer afternoon, "Hank, we bought a
computer, you have to come home and set it up!" I went home and set it up and
when I booted it up with the game called "War in Middle Earth" I was floored at
the complete arcade quality of the graphics and animation. I was instantly
hooked! It only had 512K of RAM and one floppy drive, but man, it was
awesomely powerful! After hardware problems with that I got an Amiga 2000
desktop machine with expansion slots and a hard drive. Now I was really
cooking. I had mostly been playing games, but at that time most games were
floppy disk based with copy prottection and I am just too impatient to wait for slow floppies so I
started learning the operating system in order to do my own hard drive installs.
Amigas have great graphics and I played with that a lot. I thought I would
start a graphic design business and did the artwork for a few politcal
campaigns and some business card runs for pay and in the process bought a
state-of-the-art Amiga 3000 to work with. I had started to use computer
Bulletin Boards a lot so I had a second phone line. I figured that since I had
two computers and two phone lines which were idle while I worked (at the City of
Buffalo Police Garage) and slept I might as well start my own BBS so other
people could call in and use my computer and phone line when I wasn't. That was
the beginning of the Blue Moon Online System. I found out I was unusually good
at running a BBS and "The Moon" grew in leaps and bounds until I had 20
incoming phone lines pumping out data night and day. By then it was 1994 and
The Internet was starting to pick up a head of steam so I started researching
how to connect the BBS to the net. After going over and over the best way to do
it I decided the only way to go was to become a full fledged ISP. I started
buying unix equipment, terminal servers and banks of modems and arranged for
a T1 backbone connection and soon had everything in place aside from one small
thing, CUSTOMERS! I had borrowed and spent almost $80,000 and it was starting to look like a
money pit that would go down the tubes before it even had a grand opening! I
borrowed $10,000 and did an advertising campaign blitz over the space of one
month and amazingly we covered our overhead costs that first month! It was
about a year before the business made enough to bring me out of debt and it's
grown geometrically since then. I stressed myself out big time for a couple of
years. It's a credit to my friends and family that they put up with me during
that time.
When I decided to start the ISP, my good friend Tim
(Opus in IRC) gave me a lot of help and stood behind me 100%. A nicer guy you
could never meet!
I hired a couple of cracker-jack guys who soon became partners. John and
Bill, to help me with things on The Moon.
John (SIGSEGV in IRC) was a young guy whom I had met
through the BBS and who had moved away to Florida with his family. He decided he didn't
like Florida at all so we decided he should come back to Buffalo and I'd put him
up here and put him to work. He didn't know much about programming or unix then,
but I have never seen anyone pick things up as fast as he did. I can count on
him to get almost anything done.
Bill (Alcoman in IRC) takes care of
Customer Service and a lot of the day-to-day workings for The Moon. He's a
fellow railfan and a locomotive engineer as well. Along with myself he's a
member of The Model RR Club of
Buffalo where we do some pretty serious HO scale modeling. He is also my
right-hand man in running Railfan.net.
I don't have a link for the most important person of all, my Mom. She doesn't
have a home page! She always been there when I really needed her and I
wouldn't be where I am today without her. Mother is the next largest
stockholder in our ISP, it started out as a loan, but we couldn't afford to
pay her back! Thanks Mom!
These are the people who have allowed me to reclaim my life from my job.
I learned the hard way that running your own business is one of the most
stressful things you can do. After Dad passed away suddenly in 1997 I gained a
new outlook on life and started to concentrate on enjoying things again rather
than working myself to death. If you clicked on the
Railfan.net link you already know I'm a
hard core train nut, it's one of the things I did with Dad and it helps to keep
me close to him.
Between Tim, John and Bill I have been able to delegate enough of my duties so
that I now have some time to myself and I can get away for some much needed
stress relief. No more 100 hour work weeks for me, it wasn't worth it.
Aside from trains I enjoy reading books, chatting in
IRC and programming internet services.
Aside from the usual stressful things life is great! I've got
great friends, I'm having a blast with my hobbies, I have a great car, a
challenging job and a little time left over to play!
