TankSlappa.com

“The random waffling of TankSlappa”

So who is TankSlappa...

Tis me, that's who. :-)

I'm a 30-something (okay, 30-LOTS) IT geek from the UK who plays guitar badly, rides motorbikes and snowboards. Obviously not all at the same time, that would be a bit daft now wouldn't it.

IT wise, officially I'm a programmer, but as I work for a small company they often call on my wide knowledge of techie type things. so basically everything from programming the Cisco PIX firewall to fixing machines which have let the magic smoke escape. Occasionally when I get a moment I actually get some time to do some real programming!

I own several PC's...

An IBM Thinkpad R52, which is my general work horse (using it right now). *pat* *pat*

A home-built gaming machine with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (which amazingly I haven't overclocked to death yet).

Last, but by no means least, the obligatory black box with lots of flashing lights, my server. 3Ghz P4, Supermicro motherboard and over a terabyte of storage thanks to a bank of 400GB Western digital RE2 drives on a Highpoint RAID 5 controller (it also drives all the flashy lights I mentioned). I basically got fed up with having hard drives die and loosing everything, so I decided enough was enough, and set up the server.

I own a couple of guitars

My main axe to annoy the neighbours is a Red Maple Flametop Washburn RS10V. For effects I have a Zoom 9150 effects rack unit (it's getting a bit long in the tooth now, but it still works fine). Volume is then handled by the home-made MOSFET amp. It's about 150Watts RMS per channel, which is more than enough :-)

When I'm not feeling quite so loud I can either plug my headphones into the 9150, or pick up the acoustic, a Washburn F8 I found in a shop in Stevenage for under £100 new. I think they messed up the price label. My friend Paul agreed and bought the other one!

A pair of 2 wheels

Yup, I've got more than one motorbike too... The old one I never got rid of (Honda CBR600F), and the new(er) one that was supposed to replace it (Honda VTR1000F)! After years of incident free zooming about on the 600, it only took me 6 months to propel myself over the handlebars of the VTR and fracture a few bones. Both bike and owner are now fixed.

Throwing myself down mountains

Not content with attempting to fly from a motorbike, I took up bouncing off rocks too. As usual I learnt the hard way by hiring a snowboard, going up the mountain in the lift, strapping the board to my feet and then asking my friend who had done it before "Now what do I do?".
He assures me at no point did he say crack 3 ribs and give yourself concussion, but I'm sure I wouldn't do something like that unless I was specifically told to.
A few years down the line and I now have my own board (Burton Royale), bindings (Burton Mission), boots, clothing (Bonfire/Scott). Oh, and a crash hat and body armour (Dainese!).
I haven't got much better, but at least I now bounce without breaking!