About Me

Welcome to my collection of paradoxes: a cool geeky guy with my feet firmly grounded, but head in the clouds; an analytical mind with an appreciation for art, music, and philosophy; an enjoyment of both going out and being social as well as quiet time to myself; a balance between science and magic; I generally do not swear, but am not the least bit offended by the use of 4-letter words; a carnivore who eats primarily vegetarian food; an Eagle scout who does not visually fit the stereotypical clean-cut image; a mature and organized life interspersed with spontaneous outbursts of childlike curiosity and glee.

I have been living in Portland for about five years, but was born and raised in “The OC” (with a short span between the two in Boston.) The people and attitudes in Orange County was just a little too “plastic” for me–both in the physical sense, as in “surgery,” and the social sense. People in the Pacific Northwest are much more “real” and don’t go around with fake bodies or fake attitudes.

You might call me a geek, but often that implies that one has never been bathed by the warm glow of the sun in recent years. Quite the contrary! While, admittedly, I have not gone on a proper camping trip in a great many years, I enjoy afternoons out in the wilderness (generally walking/hiking, with the rare bouldering trip thrown in to spice things up).

Contact Information

My email address is “brian” at this domain name.

Stalker Information

For those interested in stalking my online presence, I have compiled a few useful links that should minimize your amount of Googling for my name.
* I have a LiveJournal Profile
* My photos get posted to Adjective Noun
* Sometimes–when I think to do so–they also get syndicated to my Flickr account
* I post bookmarks to del.icio.us
* I read news on Digg
* I have a pretty crappy MySpace page
* I have a Facebook page, but I don’t ever really use it
* I watch lots of DVDs, as evidenced by my Netflix profile
* My Pownce profile
* My Twitter profile
* I don’t use Dodgeball much anymore, but still have a profile page
* I don’t really use it, but am also on LinkedIn
* I use a personal Wiki at Stack Overflow for keeping track of notes, config files, and scripts

About the Site

Netninja.com has been around since 1997 and has always been a place for me to host my projects, collections of links, and photos. Its most recent incarnation is as a personal blog. The projects seem to come and go–many of the old “hackerish” projects have been dropped as well as a bunch of Windows-based applications. This is partly because of changes in my life–I am not so much “an evil hacker” anymore and no longer use Windows–and partly due to time constraints–I just don’t have the time to support, for instance, some Java application that I wrote 8 years ago.

Syndication

The blog posts on this site are being syndicated to LiveJournal, Facebook, and MySpace. This is for a number of reasons. With Facebook and MySpace, I have a number of friends that use those services and pretty much constrain their internet activities to those places. They rarely visit blogs directly and would not know an RSS reader if one hit them in the face.

With LiveJournal, things are a little different, as I actively participate on LJ. I like the freedom of owning my own content and hosting it on my own domain, yet I also like the community built up around LJ. I could simply set up one of the syndicated LJ feeds, which would publish my information to LJ, but has the bad side-effect that it is detached from the username I use to read and comment on others’ journals. With the direct syndication method I use, everything is tied together nicely.

About The Theme

The template used on this site is a modification of the Wood 1.0 theme. I am still making tweaks and perfecting my modifications to the theme and will post a final version when ready. In the meantime, if you would like to get a prerelease version (in conjunction with the Creative Commons “share alike” license under which the original was written), drop me an email and I’ll zip up what I have for you.