Bring Back the 80's!

About this geek

My blog needs an About page so I'm writing one now. [Ed note: written 2004 but updated Nov 15 2008]

Drop me a line or comment if you notice I've left any glaring details out :)

I'm a proud geek. I look like a trainwreck and sleep until noon and make no sense to anyone accept sometimes myself, but I can waste you in games that nobody plays, like Portal, Combat Arms and Second Life. :)
I am a child of the 80's. I am the leader of the Flipsiders fan club. I watch and document the goings on at homestarrunner.com. No matter who you are, I guarantee I can steer the conversation away from topics you feel comfortable with or find in any way interesting.

My wife Darla is my infinite sweetheart. Our son Christian is an adorably precocious 9 year old brat. My other son Jaydon — 2 year old precocious-brat-in-training — is currently too easily distracted by soap bubbles rocking-horses and arbitrary inanimate objects to create much of a nuisance.. but we have faith that he will learn. I live in Central Oregon as one of the 12 or so people who never go outside. For a living I currently administer computer networks, generate web applications, and serve the needs of a few hundred Wireless Internet clients in Central Oregon.

The degree to which I enjoy any given topic is often subject to a number of surprisingly arbitrary modifiers. For example, any topic gains a point of interest on my behalf for involving any of the following:

• The 1980's (like Rubik's cube)


• Parody (skit comedies)


• Geekiness/Campiness (mst3k)


• Portability/self containedness (laptops, travel games, camping kits)


• Thriftiness/reusability (in story telling, reusing existing elements creatively in favor of inventing new ones. Shows with small casts)


• Animation, illustration or voice acting.

I inexplicably like any song that invokes any of the following concepts:

• The Moon (hopeless lunatic)


• Cars/driving (Even trucking. No explanation. I abhor automobiles :)


• Foreign artists

Born May 22, 1977
Married to Darla Bottle Aug 1998
Two sons, Christian Lee, born 1999
Jaydon Reiley, born 2006

"Passions":
Generating, verifying, auditing, securing, understanding, and shoveling around information. The 1980's, parodies, geekiness, campiness, cartoons, things that are self contained and things that make full and creative use of their resources. Ruby. Recovering Chat addict. [Ed note: recovery failed -- I'm on Second Life nao D:]

Sports:
soccer, sleeping, Surfing teh web, FPS, Second Life.

Activities:
sleeping, eating, being a nuisance. Trying to instruct my children how to not be a nuisance like daddy. Being attaxed bai kitty.

Books:
LOTR + Silmarillion. Harry Potter series. Science fiction by Orson Scott Card, Peirs Anthony, Stephen R. Donaldson, and Phillip Hose Farmer. Philosophy by Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Dennet, Stanislaw Lem, Lem Sportsinterviews. The Perl Camel book, The Ruby Pickaxe book, Nobody Knows Shoes. (Yeah, not a big lit buff :)

Music:
TMBG, John Tesh, Sara Maclachlan, Blue Rodeo, Counting Crows (sometimes), Enya, Lemon Demon, Wierd Al, Daft Punk, Restless Heart, The Cartoons, Yoko Kanno.

Good news, everyone! I made a radio station thing at Pandora so all your ears can bleed.

TV Shows:
MacGuyver, Star Trek TNG, Stargate SG1+Atlantis, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Futurama, Square One TV, Tenchi Muyo, The West Wing, Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, Numb3rs, House MD, Avatar the last Airbender, Firefly, Monk, Doctor Who, Fullmetal Alchemist, Claymore, The Muppet Show, first 2/3 of Deathnote.

Movies:
Shrek II, The Matrix, Contact, Fight Club, LOTR extended editions, the Harry Potter movies so far (including repaired version of 3), The Neverending Story (1 only), Back to the Future Trilogy, The American President, Bicentenial Man, In the mouth of Madness, South Park BLU, Pirates of the Carribean, The Shawshank Redemption, Amelie, The Princess Bride, Die Hard I-III, Groundhog Day, Happy Feet, The Pirates of the Carribean Trilogy (2 is only good and 3 only makes sense if you think of them as one long film), Twister, Titanic, Steamboy, Gattaca, All Pixar except "Bug's Life" which is ho-hum, Constantine, Super Troopers, The Iron Giant, Babe.

Cuisines:
Lasagna and various italian pastas, Mongolian Barbecue and various asian dishes (+ for sweet and sour chicken, minusminus for egg foo yung), burgers, country fried steak, various mexican dishes, I've even recently aquired a taste for very hot spices. ("very" hot being according to consumer labeling; I have no other frame of reference)
Pizza, the better the better
Ice Cream: mint chocolate-chip
I don't like any kind of berries at all.

High School:
Crook County High School, Oregon

College/University:
Central Oregon Community College

Major:
Computer Science

Occupation:
Geek of Almost All Trades

Job Description:
Make electronic gadgets go "beep", make network appliances ph43r me, impress people with acts of ubergeekiness.

Career Skills:
Ability to program in almost every computer language extant. Extreme skills getting things done using HTML, CSS, and Flash. CSS purist. Extreme skills developing web based applications. Intermediate skills deploying Local and Metropolitan Area Networks for SOHO, small business, and distributed internet service. Extreme technical skills in Adobe: Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign.
I can edit and layout content, but have little skill generating content. Using these tools I can make any webpage/webapp/network/newspaper designer's dreams come true, but have no skill creatively dreaming up such designs myself.
Them's the breaks :)

Career Interests:
Rigorously proving that I am geekier than U, for any given value of 'U'. Especially U (points finger at U ;). Figuring out how to harness teh U tubes for fun and/or profit. Maybe I wanna start up a restaraunt review site. Who knoes? :D

Social Peeves:
Peer pressure, manipulation, intimidation, ostracism, complex/compound questions, interpersonal politics.

Visceral peeves (stuff that inexplicably pushes yer buttons):
I'm insecure about the location of the smallest of a set of bones — such as my pinky fingers, pinky toes, and floating ribs. For instance, if someone tries to pull my pinky away from my other fingers it takes an average of 351 milliseconds for them to find their own skeletal structures in much higher degrees of danger than mine. It's a phobia, what can I do?
There are specific fibre materials that I cannot stand to touch. Like Velvet or Velvetine. It has short stiff bristles that get up under my fingernails. It give me the Jibblies.
There are certain other fibre materials I can't stand the concept of being moistened under duress. Paper napkins are a good example. If you try to write on a paper napkin with a ball point pen, or worse yet try to EAT a paper napkin, I'll probably do immature things to distract my mind from the unsueing horror like blocking the view, fleeing in desperate panick or perhaps egging you into the stone age with Dane Petersen's patented egg-you-into-the-stone-age-o-matic device.

Personal heros:
Angus MacGuyver, Archimedes of Syracuse, Sir Ernest Rutherford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Warren Robinett, Einstien, Edison, Asimov, Seagan, Turing, Nash, Babbage, Ada, Euclid, Gauss, DesCartes, Ghandi, Escher, Magritte, Hofstadter (Robert) and his collegue Richard Hanni who took the time to patiently explain to me the concept of finite, boundless space time. Oh yea, and my great x7 grandpa John Adams.

Who I'd like to meet:
the little person responsible for turning the refrigerator light on when I open the door. That dude knows what up, yo!

Posted by jesse at June 29, 2004 02:47 AM