Hi I’m Paul Smith and this is my website.

I grew up in Yeovil, Somerset and was heavily involved with the early internet scene, you may remember me from Usenet and the Undernet hanging around on various left-wing or technology groups and channels. I ran a fairly substantial network of gaming websites back in the day and started blogging in 2004, hosted a podcast for ten years and was involved with the early streaming scene until it started to fizz out and was replaced by large social media companies that ended up dominating and in a very real way changed what the internet was for many people.

In 2021, after letting my blog rot for perhaps five or six years, what energy I did invest in social media I’ve decided to try and re-invest into my blog - I miss the olden days, with trackbacks, pingbacks, RSS and the general openness of the web. It’s sad to see so many rich and diverse communities that existed online now deserted, and in some cases they’re now nothing more than a pile of broken hyperlinks and expired domain names.

I suppose I’m blogging again to try and resist that trend. Too many see the internet as a way to make their social media app work - they scroll infinitely through their feed, shown material decided by an algorithm judged most likely to generate a response from them and increase time spent on the platform. I don’t think that is necessarily helpful to humanity.

Historically aside from hosting my blog dasmirnov.net also hosted various web-based projects I’ve worked on. There’s a pretty good chance you’ve just stumbled upon this from one of many old sub-domains for these projects, or from old hosted accounts that somehow ended up forwarded here.

Legecy about page below, here for historical reasons?

Hi there

So you found my about me page. Well I’m Paul Smith and this is my blog as you may have already guessed. Beyond hanging out on a few forums here and there this is my main focus on the internet these days. Yes you might remember me from Usenet and the Undernet, well hello there, nice to see you again.

I was born back in 1982 and lived most of my life in Yeovil, that’s in Somerset in the UK. I have since moved to Aldershot, which is in Hampshire.

I’ve tested about two dozen games for Microsoft over the years, well back when they used to make games; yes I’m the guy that made sure the Millennium Dome was moved to its proper location in Flight Simulator. I also have a collection of gaming-related websites that are, well were mildly successful. I’ve also been a parliamentary candidate in Yeovil. In addition to that I’ve received the MVP award from Microsoft between 2006 and 2011 for my contributions in online technical communities. I’ve also hosted Gamercast since 2005.

Contact me

E-mail

There’s a few different ways you can get in touch. The most obvious is e-mail, no social-networking hasn’t taken over. You can e-mail me at paul@dasmirnov.net.

Please bear in mind I get a fair bit of tech support requests in my e-mail. I simply can’t answer all of them. If you’re after technical support (at least with Microsoft stuff), hit the Microsoft Answers forum. I post on there, and it’ll be better if my time can be spent not only helping you but anybody else who comes along later with the same problem. If you prefer lolcats and flame wars with your technical support check out Portal Forums, I hang about on there too.

Messenger

I also use Windows Live Messenger. Feel free to add me, my Windows Live ID is paul@dasmirnov.net.

Keep in mind the technical support stuff mentioned above.

The rest

I don’t like Facebook and Twitter, but I do use them.