Good Men can be Bad

When you only know someone for one reason it can catch you out when the real person intrudes. Hans Reiser was one¹ and now he's joined by Andrew Bond. "Who?" you may ask. So did I.

Well Andrew Bond was convicted last week of grooming a 14 year old boy on the Internet and then twice raping him and he has been jailed for eight and a half years.

The Internet rumour mill says that Bond was the man behind Metcheck, one of the best sites on the Web for weather forecasting after the Met Office, and it does seem to be the same bloke. The news report I've linked to refers to him as "an amateur weather forecaster from Exeter" and gives his address as Fleming Way and metcheck.com is currently registered to Bond, 14 The Grange, Fleming Way.

Apparently questions were being asked about this on the Metcheck forums but they're now offline. Actually this is good news as it means someone's hand is clearly still on the tiller and it's always looked as if Metcheck was some sort of loose collective of weather nerds so hopefully it will survive in one form or another.

1. Lead developer of the ReiserFS journalling filing system for which he got many plaudits in the Linux community. He then murdered his wife, Wikipedia has the whole sorry story.