(or at least, I pretend they are frequently asked)

Why the name Booberfish.com?

Booberfish is the name of my very first pet all my own. The name Booberfish was derived from a combination of his species - Betta fish - and a character from a favourite children’s television show - Boober Fraggle. He was short lived (something which I blame his aquarium mates Pablo and Fiesta for) but now his memory lives on. The story is here. The other option was “Uncle Greg’s Old Tyme Jug Band Fun Time Hour”, which is a good title but a bit too long for the menu bar at the top. The acronym, UGOTJBFTH, didn’t have much of a ring to it either, so this great idea was banished to the ranks of subtitle. (Thanks anyway, Meghan.)

What are the photos in the header background?

Each section has a different photo, which I originally thought would somehow represent what that section was about, but has more than less just come to be a picture of something pretty of the appropriate colour. In the main section (where this page is), it’s my abacus, which is just one of the many dorky toys I have lying around, because this website is itself one of my dorky toys. The compendium has some autumn leaves taken in one of the seven hells of Oita-ken in Japan. Don’t worry, there’s no real significance to that one. The galleries‘ header also comes from Japan, this time the garden of an old shogun’s estate on Kyushu. Finally, the blog’s photo is of New River Beach in New Brunswick. It reminds me of that scene in the movie GO, where the father says “Hiroi seikai o miro” (look at the wide world) while sitting with his son on the beach. That’s kind of what the blog is for, so I thought it vaguely appropriate. All four photos were taken by me.

How old is this website, really?

The name Booberfish.com only dates back to Summer 2006, but this website existed in some form well before then (e.g., The Nebula, Crap-house, etc). The age printed at the bottom of every page as part of the site’s statistics is based on the oldest content still on the site, which goes back to the late 1990s, when I first started playing around at making a personal website. A lot of it is junk, but what can I say, I hate to throw anything out.

What is “The Nebula”?

That’s the old name for this same website. I knew I was making a webpage that would be a big mess of all the other half-baked webpages I had (a mess of crap, if you will) and also that I like astronomy. So what name would bring together the reality of a big mess of crap and the field of astronomy? A nebula! And yes, I already know that I’m a dork.

What was Greg-In-Japan?

Essentially this website, but with only the photo galleries.

What was Crap-house?

Essentially this website, except smaller, uglier, and without any photo galleries.

What was NTex?

Ah those middle school days… it is, I assure you, quite dead. In fact it didn’t really have much life to begin with. It was more of a protobacterial mold than anything else. If you want to see what remains, look at the games available for download. Those sad, sad games.

What was Gp2000?

Even lower on the evolutionary ladder than NTex ever was.