Q: Where do you live?
A: Though I like to be vague, I live in the suburbs north of Boston,
a
couple of blocks from the waterfront. If you're interested enough
in me to actually read the blog entries I write, the info is revealed
many a time there. We have a great old house that we
almost sold earlier this year. However, we decided that it was a
poor idea and were able to extricate ourselves.
Q: What exactly do you do, anyways?
A: I'm a father. That's my main job, and the one I enjoy most - as my former employer has contracted significantly in size - and I was already contracted out. When I was there, I was an IT manager who last managed the technical team at Holyoke Mutual. I was pretty good at it, according to my reviews and my former employees. My technical expertise is primarily in hardware and networking, and I'm strong in security issues as well. I'm good with Windows, Linux, and MacOS. If you're a prospective employer, e-mail me and I'll send you my resume. But being a father is still first (and favorite) on my list - unfortunately, though the overall pay package for that is wonderful, the cash portion of the compensation package for fatherhood isn't as good. As a result, I started up a consulting operation back in March of '04 that has done moderately well so far.
Q: Why do you write all this stuff anyways? Don't you know that bloggers are dull as anything?
A: I never said I was all that exciting, and nobody has to read it. I started writing my blog on a whim in late 2001, when Slashdot introduced their "Journals" feature. I wrote occasionally until my son David was born in May of 2002, and then it became a neat way to share the fun and events of parenthood with my friends and family as David's developed.
Now, blogging is second nature for me, and I write about whatever
comes
to my mind whenever. There's probably a nugget of insightful writing
inside this somewhere. But I'm the sort of optimist who sees a
huge room full of horse excrement, and figures there has to be a pony
in there somewhere so it's worth digging.
Of course, I change a lot of diapers, too.
Q: Mac or Windows?
A: I've made a good living from Windows over the years, so I can't
rip it too badly, but Mac. Definitely Mac. I kinda miss VMS, though.
Q: You actually own a minivan? Why?
A: Children require lots of hauling. I now know this. I still prefer my old SUV, but those days appear to be over. However, AWD is one of the reasons I had a truck, and my minivan (a Chevy Venture) has it.
Q: Enough already about the kid! You're driving me nuts!
A: It's my blog. I can rant about how wonderful my son is if I want to ;-)
Q: How many computers do you own, exactly?
A: My Nerd Page on my website covers this, with pictures to boot (not quite up-to-date). Here's the current roster:
First, there's the newest incarnation of MacDaddy, an iMac G5. I also have an Apple PowerBook G4 (a 1.5 GHz Aluminum model).
Then, there's another iMac. My wife has an older widescreen
iMac G4, which is the 800 MHz model. We have my old 1.25 GHz G4 model which is awaiting overhaul and re-use.
Then I have a newly built Windows XP (MCE) PC on the other side of my Nerd Room. It's a Dell Dimension that I originally bought for work and then tweaked the heck out of.
There's also a Mac mini running as a server in the basement. That serves as my main web/e-mail server, and I run my antispam system there. It runs Tiger Server.
There's also a pair of older Slot A Athlon systems in full tower cases. One's in the basement and one in the Nerd Room. Both run Mandrake Linux and are intended for casual use.
I still have my old home server, just recently returned to service. It's a Celeron 366 in a FlexATX case.
Finally, I have an old internet appliance called an i-Opener. My friend Rob and I took some of these and converted them into cheap cool PC's with flatscreens. Mine is currently looking cool in the bookcase, but it used to be in the living room.
I also have five handhelds - an HP iPaq 1935 (gotten ridiculously cheap), a Palm Tungsten T, a Sharp Zaurus 5500, and an old Newton MessagePad 2100. I bought the Newton used a year or so ago in a fit of nostalgia. This past summer I added a Treo 650 to the collection, and all my other devices have fallen by the wayside. Jane has a Palm M100 and actually uses it.
Basically, there's three "everyday" computers (the two Macs and my Windows box), and everything else is there for the fun of it. David uses Jane's ancient iMac G3 (an iMac DV 450), which he calls "Macie" and plays games on.
Q: What's David's favorite music?
A: David's tastes have changed - his new favorite music is They Might Be Giants. He likes all their stuff, but their kids' albums are a particular fave. He also likes the Dropkick Murphys a lot because they use bagpipes and he thinks those are cool.
Q: Do you have some kind of fantasy that you're a writer or something?
A: I do. I've met the primary criteria, in that I've received money for material I've written. I've been published in Linux Journal, had another piece in Linux Gazette, been printed in a few user group newsletters and a couple of geek papers, and I started work on a nerd book a few years ago that went into limbo half-finished - the publisher has a good deal of material that I've been paid for and may decide to use at some point. Someday I may even write the Great American Novel. But I wouldn't count on it. I've also contributed a lot of op-eds to my local newspaper.
Q: What's your golf average?
A: A hair under 100. Good distance, decent putting, no short game. I play about once per week. I can shoot in the high 80's on a really good day, but I don't have many of those. And I don't have time to play much nowadays, so I don't expect the average to improve much.
Q: I've been to your house. You've got way too many hats. What's your favorite?
A: It's a toss-up between my fitted official Red Sox hat and a giant rubber cheesehead that my friend Michael Steinberg bought me a long time back. As a sidenote, I wear a 7 7/8 in fitted hats.
Q: Do you use WEP, even though it's horribly broken?
A: Of course. And I don't broadcast an SSID, and I use MAC address filtering. That said, I still keep an eye out for folks in front of the house aiming Pringles cans at us. And I use WPA at work.
Q: Vi or Emacs?
A: BBEdit.
Q: Are you available for small-scale jobs?
A: Check my Office site for details and rates, but basically I'll do anything computer-related for money so long as it's legal. I'm best at Macintosh work (I'm certified by Apple), Windows, and anything security-related.
Q: I've seen the pictures you post on your website. They look pretty good. how do you shoot them?
A: All my older stuff was shot on a 4-year-old Olympus C-3000 digital camera, with a 3.3 megapixel CCD. I just replaced that about a month or so ago with an HP R707 camera that's higher-res (5 MP) and half the size. Occasionally we shoot film and then I get a PhotoCD made. But mostly with the Olympus. The pictures are imported into iPhoto, and then I export selections at 1/2 resolution (I constrain to 1024x768) and process minimally before building the web pages. I have an old Nikon 6006 that I would use for any real photography. The Dude pages themselves are built with PhotoPage, a free utility by an Apple employee.
Hint for digicam owners: Keep the LCD off and just use the viewfinder. You'll get more than double the battery life that way.
Q: What's the meaning of life?
A: That's easy.
Q: I've read your blog - and I'm confused. You seem to be all over the place when you give any kind of opinion on issues. Do you actually have any kind of consistent philosophy??
A: Yes. But damned if I know what it is. Seriously, I think I can best be described as "left-leaning libertarian", in that I generally believe in the libertarian philosophy of less governmental interference in our lives. However, I'm pragmatic. I think there are some places where government is the best way to get something done - typically very big things that scale upwards. For instance, I belive that the military and highway system need to be governmentally-run, and I'm not opposed to the concept of nationalized health care insurance. But I believe that government should stay far removed from the everyday lives of citizens, and that taxes should be minimal (but progressive). I don't think all taxes are inherently bad, and I oppose most of GWB's cuts that were put in over the last several years.
Most importantly, I think that individuals should be free to engage in behaviors that don't harm others, even if you personally disagree with them. I favor eliminating most drug laws, for instance, even though I don't use them. I am pro-marriage, including gay marriage - though I'm straight myself. I oppose all censorship laws, though there are many things I personally find offensive. I don't see how allowing people these harms me in any way. Our drug laws don't keep people from using them (obviously), so why not decriminalize them and tax them - forcing drugs out of the underground economy? To me, it's an obvious call.
Basically, I dislike the twaddle I see on both sides of the political spectrum, but despite my libertarian tendencies I dislike the moralistic right more than I dislike the woolly-headed left. This year, I became so fed up with the Republicans that I re-registered as a Democrat. I don't like the Dems that much, either, but I despise the Republican party and I can do more as a member of the largest opposition party.
Q: You read a lot - we know that part. How much media do you actually consume?
A: I read the Boston Globe daily. I also read the local paper once or twice a week and until recently the Vineyard Gazette. For news and general-interest magazines, I read Reason, Yankee, Smithsonian, and Wired (the last came to me as a premium when I subscribed to Salon). For tech journals, I read IEEE Spectrum, Computer, InfoWorld, Network World, IEEE Communications Journal, Macworld, and a few others I can't recall offhand. I also try to read 2 general interest books weekly (one fiction and one non-fiction), and I usually read a technical book of some sort about every other week. That's on average - the pace dropped a little the first few months after David was born and it's gone up while I've been out of work. I also read Salon, the New York Times, and Slashdot online religiously, as well as Fark.
I watch very few movies - typically one every month or two from the
library's DVD section. We go to the movies about once per year. That's
been the same with David around. I used to be an obsessive moviegoer
but have been at low levels for a long time. The last one we saw
was in January - The Incredibles. That was our first film since October of '03.
For TV, thanks to my TiVo I watch very few hours overall weekly (fast-forward!). I watch occasional news broadcasts, but get most of that from the Reuters feed online. Mainly I watch home shows (Trading Spaces and This Old House), food shows (Good Eats, Iron Chef, A Cook's Tour), sports, and pro wrestling - to which I'm addicted. David watches Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer, and Jane likes the news channels. Jane mostly watches news shows, and none of us really like reality TV per se.
Q: How do you run this site?
A: I replaced my Mini-ITX server with a Mac mini this year so I coould better dogfood myself. Power consumption is only a few watts higher, and it looks cooler. It's on a rack in the basement, sharing space with a Netopia 910 router and a DSL modem. The DSL connection is a 1.5/768 ADSL circuit with Speakeasy, who uses Worldcom as a CLEC. My pages are primarily done with BBEdit, and I use NVU (the successor to Mozilla Composer) for the occasional pseudo-WYSIWYG work. I'm not an HTML wizard. The only reason this page looks halfway decent is because I stole the stylesheet from my blog. And that's from a template.
Q: Is this all a joke?
A: Yes. Except for the parts that aren't.
Last updated 10/29/05.