So, you want to know a little about PETE?

Well, in that case you’ve come to the right place.

Peter; Pete; Pedro; Poita; Petey; Horse; Dickhead: All names for the one person.

Pete is a 23 year old Melbournian, currently in his 3rd year studying at Monash University towards a Bachelor of Science. Although he is enjoying himself and fully intends to finish the undergraduate degree, he would like to eventually pursue something at the postgraduate level in the medical field – possibly postgrad medicine itself.

Pete would like to think that he’s well travelled – having visited all the continents on earth apart from Antarctica. His most recent foray into the big wide world was during 2004, where he spent a great deal of time in Cape Town, South Africa working voluntarily in the city’s biggest township, during a ‘gap’ year. He spent the year with a bridging program for township kids who had failed school, both in an administrative capacity as well as from time to time actually teaching subjects he had himself only studied (and barely passed) at high school level a year or two previously such as Chemistry, Maths, English and Physics. He also ran the computing program, having had no experience at all with formal IT education, either as a teacher or a student.

Pete considers himself a fairly cultured chap Рa diverse range of music, film and books are the more clich̩ of his interests with sport, the beach and beer making sure the list stays true to his Australian values. A relatively new entry to this list, and one sure to set him back many a dollar over many a year is travel Рhe has been well and truly bitten by the bug.

Pete has two younger brothers and his parents are (still) together. They live in relative peace, although that may have something to do with the fact that the 3 boys are generally in quite different locations around the planet at any one time.

All Pete wants in life is a good sleep, a good beer and eventually a good job and a loving, caring sheila whom he can beat into submission nightly – pretty easy to please really. And pretty easy to get to know, so go ahead – email him today! You never know, you might be that special person for him…. awww.

So, you want to know a little about DIALAGRANNY.COM?

Well, there’s less of a story there. Pete has been online since Christmas 1996, when a 33.6kbps dialup modem and a cheap internet plan was given to him as a present from a fairly tech-savvy Santa. In the first couple of months of having an internet connection at home, he made friends with Lauren, a Filipina 9 months his junior, who despite her age (11 at the time) had created and maintained an online keypal club numbering some 2000 members. Through her’s and other’s guidance Pete slowly learnt, little by little, more about the workings of computers and in June 2002 was forced into starting an online weblog (or blog) as part of the protagonist domain. In August of that year, after Pete’s lack of artistic ability and over-abundance of laziness became apparent to Lauren, she ‘skinned’ the site for him with a very funky blue theme, which stayed the visual theme of PETEblog for over two years with once week-long exception.

In September 2003, as a celebration of 400 posts in a little over a year, Pete forked out his life savings of approximately eight US dollars for the domain name ‘dialagranny.com’ and the blog jumped over to it’s own domain name and a new server, buried somewhere in the great expanse of the USA. The site has since moved several more times for various reasons, with the website currently on its fourth server.

During late 2004 while Pete was travelling abroad, the site started to experience crippling amounts of comment spam (up to a thousand a day), a problem which has since become common with blogs worldwide. Because the time in front of a computer necessary to deal with comment spam properly was impossible for the then-nomadic Pete, commenting was turned off for about two months until December when an upgrade in blogging software from b2 to WordPress took place and spam protection measures were implemented. Along with this upgrade came a change to the visual appearance of the site – the first of its kind since Lauren’s August 2002 theme. Since then it has become something of a tradition for a new theme to be implemented for each new year.

Since the December ’04 move to WordPress, the blog has undergone minor version upgrades as well as having more bandwidth intensive features such as a music streamer and video capabilities installed, but has basically remained the same ol’ blog throughout.

Last updated: July 2007

Biography and history of Pete / dialagranny.com © 2004-2007. Compiled by Sir Peter Hay, historian and author of the award winning ‘What the hell happened here, then?’, a look into the mystery and myth surrounding the Dark Ages. RRP £12.99 at all good book stores.