TechgnosisWeb Prime

Hi there. This is my nth attempt at keeping some sort of journal, public or otherwise. Hopefully the fact that this one is being kept on a portable device with a built in keyboard that I can take out of my pocket and type on pretty much anywhere and at any time (a Sharp Zaurus 5500. Linux in your pocket is the r0xx0rz!) will help me in keeping it current longer than my previous aborted attempts.

So, here’s a quick intro to me, I’ll try to keep it fairly short and simple so we can jump to the blogging proper. My meatspace name is Daniel Rodriguez, but online I go by the moniker Katsushiro (a.k.a. Katsu, .K., The PimpNinja, and Snugglebuns). A self-professed gadget, technology, and Net freak, I grew up around computers (thanks in large part to having a highly geeky engineer as a father) and somewhere around the mid-90’s, I discovered that there InterWeb thingy, and that’s about the last anyone heard of my sanity.

Flash-forward to 2003 and I’m now a mildly successful web programmer in his mid-twenties (not web designer, mind you. I have the fashion sense of an earthworm), with dreams of someday becoming a moderately successful programmer. I have the bestest girlfriend in the whole wide world, friends who rate on the high end of the Cool-o-Meter, am slowly paying off all my bills, and am fairly happy with my lot in life.

So that’s me in a nutshell. There’s more to me than that, of course, a lot of drama that I’ve tried to put behind me, and which I’m fairly certain you’ll be hearing about in later entries. With that out of the way, let’s get this exercise in self-aggrandizement and navel-gazing underway. o.o;

Today’s been a fairly uneventful day, not many new adventures in the world of geekdom, so this little rant’s gonna focus on how this blog gets made: first off, I’m writing this before I’ve even decided what web software to use for it. I’m mostly familiar with PHPNuke, but frankly, that’s overkill for what I’m envisioning as a small, semi-private journal for my daily thoughts. I’ll probably look into GreyMatter and Blogger when I get home later. I’d ask for suggestions, but I presume that by the time anyone reads this I’ll already have made a decision. -.o

So, I suppose you might be wondering how and where I’m writing this if my blogware isn’t even up? Well, that’s where my new baby comes in: the Sharp Zaurus 5500. A 64 MB, 200 Mhz, Linux-powered little powerhouse of a PDA with a built in keyboard, high-res color screen, CF and SD card slots, and all sorts of goodies for a geek like me. Being Linux-powered, I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not the most user-friendly of machines half the time: its PIM functions are adequate, but nothing to write home about, and its other applications are nice, but not perfect. For a regular, everyday user who wants a pocket PDA to hold his phone numbers and appointments, I’d recommend a Palm or even a PocketPC device. But for a programmer geek like me, it’s an amazing piece of machinery. The fact that it runs Linux means that I can pull up a Konsole window and start hacking wherever I happen to be. I can run an Apache+PHP web server right on it, query the installed MySQL database, and hack out a quick web app from anywhere. Factor in the fact that I can run a Commodore 64 emulator, a NES, SNES, GB, and other emulators, and a variety of pocket sized versions of many Linux desktop and command line apps, and this little beast has some serious geek cred.

So there you go, that’s how I’m writing this and all future blog posts. Using Hancom Word and saving my posts to .rtf files, then moving them to my desktop or uploading them directly to the web from the Zaurus if I stumble across a Net connection. This means I can write from anywhere, at any time. I’m hoping that the ability to write down my thoughts no matter where I am, and not having to be tied down to a regular PC to write will help me keep this blog going longer than my previous efforts to keep any kind of journal, while lending a sense of immediacy to the blog that I hope will make it at least mildly interesting/entertaining to read.

So there you go, an intro to me and how I write my new blog. As to what it’s about, well, it’s just a blog. No real theme to it, though I suppose it may well develop one eventually. Stay tuned.