Welcome to the realm of The Canadian Hermit!
The Canadian Hermit has a long history online, starting somewhere between fifteen and twenty years ago as "thehermit" on the internet forums site WTF.com and in their at the time official chat, #wtf.com on the IRC server EFNet. (OK, I didn't start out as "thehermit", but used my real first name. However, it wasn't all that long before I decided to go the slightly more anonymous route and switch to "thehermit".)
After a multi-year break from WTF.com and IRC, I started into a bunch of local networking and systems administration, so for support I connected to Freenode IRC, or, at least the original version of it. If I remember correctly, I originally registered as "thehermit".
In May 2021, there were huge changes at Freenode and multiple staff resigned. In what seemed to be no time at all, these ex-staffers had organized and started a new IRC network which they called Libera.Chat. As soon as I knew about it, I had registered at Libera.Chat, again as "thehermit". However, it wasn't long before I changed my registered nick to "thecdnhermit". And no, "cdn" does not stand for "content delivery network", it's shorthand for "Canadian"!
Somewhere in this period of time, I decided to attempt to set up my own IRC server. At the time I didn't own the domain "thecdnhermit.com", so I simply used one of the domains I did have. Then one day it clicked that I should purchase this domain, and now "thecdnhermit" is more than just an IRC nick, it is the domain that hosts my public IRC server and related services.
In late 2024, I decided to set up a forum site. Within a few hours, I had a basic forums set up, thanks to phpBB and their easy to use forum software! I figured the forums could be used to document major tech discussions we have in IRC, or just be a different way to have certain conversations.
Now it's nearing the end of February 2025, and it had been bugging me that the hard drive in my one system had failed, leaving me without an internet radio broadcast. I had been fairly involved with doing live internet radio shows with others from WTF.com forums back around 2010, and the radio bug never really left me. So now I finally got around to getting another system set up (as that one was getting old anyway) and now have a basic streaming setup. There will be some scheduling adjustments as time goes on; I'll create a page just for the radio at some point.
So again, welcome! Join us in chat, and/or the forums if you like! I hope you enjoy your stay!