User:BlackWyrmm

BlackWyrmm Toombs: Voodoo Shaman for State Government somewhere in the Midwest

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Tinker, Cobbler, Artist, Philosopher, Author and Dad to Number 1 Son.

I take stuff apart, figure out what makes it tick, add something geeky and gadgety to it, and put it back together again. Rarely are the fruits of my labor useful for any real practical purpose. But that isn't the point anyway. It's the journey, not the destination that I'm hungry for.

I'm a programmer of sorts... give me the manual, give me a week, and I'll at least get it to sit up and roll over. I 'borrow' alot more code than I create. It's an instant gratification thing. The whole point of programming is to automate something I'm too lazy to do by hand, anyway.

And what I most like to automate are 3D digital puppets. CGI. Animated 3D virtual reality stuff. The math doesn't scare me much, and learning to use obscure bits of software is my meat and potatoes. More tinkering.

To pay for all my toys, pizzas, and Mini-Me's size 18 shoes, I hafta work.

There isn't alot of need for 3D modellers or animators in state government, and department administrators just don't seem to understand the 'take it apart and see it's guts' approach to Certification Training. We're supposed to FIX stuff. Make it so it DOESN'T come apart. And do it on a state budget.

So, I figured out how to wave a rubber chicken over something that isn't working, and cycle the power. Works every time. Phooey on MSCEs. Pthbbbtbtbtbtbtt!

When I'm not fixin and mixin with the 'Users', I'm hoggin bandwidth and stuffing my blinky boxes with whatever Open Source creation has bubbled to the top of the SourceForge linklist. If it does anything with packets, regexes, HTML, CSS, XML, I snag it. Sniffers and snorters, hijackers, monitors, keyboard interceptors, monitors, probes, firewalls, stress testers, .... you name it. If the hackers are playing with it, I've gotta have it. Know your enemy.

And I have to maintain a really ugly website, comply with acessibility standards, ... no flash, no slick interfaces, and worse... really really dry content. Have you ever seen a state government website that had anything you'd bookmark? I think not. And so, my free lunch is thusly paid for, one ugly HTML page at a time. <sigh>