My name is Chris Pinard, though I am also known as "Slarti". The nickname comes from my using "slarti" as a username on Unix systems for several years now, and derives from "Slartibartfast," a character from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio/book/television series. Originally from Biddeford, Maine (which I often refer to as the Pit of Banality), I'm now living in oh-so-wonderful Worcester, Massachusetts.
Originally, I'd come to Worcester to attend Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I started out in the Electrical and Computer Engineering program, but after a year and a half, decided that I rather preferred software to hardware, and so I changed my major to Computer Science. I'd attended WPI for a total of three years, starting in fall of 1995, but apathy kicked in unusually strongly at the beginning of my third year, and I ended dropping out after the end of the 1997-1998 school year.
Rather than return back home to Biddeford, with all that that would've entailed, I decided to stay in Worcester, living and working here, so I can continue to hang out with the friends I'd made while attending WPI. Which was great, until I had to move back to Biddeford anyway, due to financial concerns, several years later.
After dropping out, I'd gotten a job at Forefield, Inc., from which I moved on a couple of years later to start work at WPI's Computing and Communications Center (CCC) as a Unix Systems Administrator.
Unfortunately, in recent times finances have gotten rather grim for WPI, and so after having been there for three years, I've been laid off. So now the job hunt begins anew. I have my resumé avalable online for those who wish to have a look.
It's really rather a shame. I enjoyed working for WPI, and the atmosphere it provided. But the economy is still much worse off then it was during the glory days of the "dot-coms", and the school did what they felt they had to. And, in the end, so have I, as I've had to move back home to Biddeford until I can afford a leap back out to far-flung lands.
Having vanished from the world of Worcester, I'm back living with my parents at 15 Clarendon St. in Biddeford, Maine. That it hasn't been as bad as I've feared is mainly because a section of the basement has been set up as my own living room area, allowing me to watch TV, be online, etc. separately from whatever Mom and Dad are doing.
I'm a Gweep by inclination, which ends up meaning that I play around with computers and stuff for fun a lot. In my spare time, I also run Gallifrey, which serves as my primary personal gweeping platform and has provided Unix shell and e-mail access for some of my friends. Originally, Gallifrey was a 486 running Linux.
Since those days, I've come to possess an overall preference for BSD-style Unixes. After moving on from Linux, security paranoia led me to switch to OpenBSD, a version of Unix designed expressly to be as inherently secure as possible. Since then, I've decided that I needed wider hardware support and a more rapid software development cycle, and that while OpenBSD is good for the high-security applications like firewalls and such, FreeBSD is secure enough for my regular daily needs. So now Gallifrey's an Athlon XP 1800+ running FreeBSD. I also have panopticon, which is a Duron 800MHz machine running FreeBSD as my graphical workstation, allowing me to gweep from the comfort of the couch in my living room..
(Actually, at the moment, Gallifrey itself is offline because two machines running all the time is deemed an excessive use of electricity, and panopticon is performing Gallifrey's duties as best it can.)
Anyone curious about the sub-subtitle of this page can read more about the... interesting relationship I have with the so-called Murphy's Law.
This site also has what few pictures I maintain, as well as what little "product" I create during long Gweeping sessions and the occasional bout of writing which I can actually piece together well enough to put into words.
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."
-- Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996
I advocate strict adherence to W3C specifications in creation and management of Web content. Hence, my pages are written in strict HTML, putting only structural description into my markup, and all presentational concerns are handled by usage of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Currently most of my code adheres to HTML 4.0 Strict, though I have started what little work should be needed to convert to HTML 4.01, and intend to look to XHTML and learn what changes it brings, how it furthers the goals of portable Web authoring and content/presentation separation.
Unsurprisingly, given that the Web is designed to be a dynamic thing, my site is a work in continuous progress. It'll get stuff added, deleted, and updated as I have time and opportunity. It's actually pretty skeletal right now, with a number of different things I'm looking on putting in. For now, though, Share and Enjoy...
