So who exactly is this lunatic, anyway?

Like the ad says, sometimes life calls for deeper answers.

I'm 22 years old and I was born and raised in Seymour, Indiana - that's John Mellencamp's "Small Town" for those keeping track. School sucked and I'm still creative despite everything they tried to do to fix that. I haven't finished college yet, I'm laying low for a semester or two while my finances get back on track, and then I'm switching to a college that doesn't suck.

Meanwhile, I'm working two part-time jobs trying to make ends meet. Neither job is quite enough yet to keep me afloat; the two together eat so much of my life it doesn't matter whether I have money or not, I never have time to spend it. Job #1 is Compassworks, a small but good Web development company where I work through the day, making HTML jump through hoops and building the graphics and Perl that goes with it. Job #2 is Hoosier On-Line Systems, the second largest Internet provider in Indiana (they tell me), where I answer technical support and learn first hand just how terrible the quality control is on some computers.

As for the Amiga, I first heard about it in 1986, I'd just read in a book that "some computers can display as many as 256 colors," and then saw in a computer magazine a yearly roundup of computer systems and one computer in the list had the widest numbers in every category. Colors available: 16,16,4096,2,16,8,etc. Maximum colors onscreen: 2,4,2,6,16,4,4096,4,2,16,etc. Sound channels: 1,3,1,1,3,4 (stereo),1,etc. Graphics resolution: 320x200, 256x192, 320x200, 640x400 (more with overscan), 320x200, etc. You get the idea. I had to have one. I had a Tandy Color Computer, which was nice, but those Amiga specs looked nicer. Keywords like "multitasking" and "windows" and "stereo" kept ringing in my head.

I got to see an Amiga up close and personal at a stand in a mall in Indianapolis in 1988 - a local Amiga dealer was showing off the new A2000 - and while the dudes were away from the table, I played with it. I already knew how Macintoshes worked - this was very similar - the color scheme was ugly, but oh the graphics! They had a disk full of pictures and animations, things like the old Shoot the Hoop anim, a picture of a Star Destroyer, several other showoffs... and Juggler. This was the stuff of workstations - stuff that should not have even been possible. Just one teensy problem: there was no way in hell I was ever going to afford an A2000.

I finally got enough ahead in my finances to buy a used A500 in 1993. 1MB RAM, one floppy, Kickstart 1.3, and it was still an advanced system even then. That eventually became 3MB, Kickstart 2.05, and a stack of floppies - but the hard drive controller on the RAM module had failed, and I needed a hard drive.

The local computer club broke up in 1995 and had to sell their assets, which included an A1200 with an 80MB hard drive. I lined up and got it - at a price you'd shoot me if you knew. Eventually it became home to a Microbotics 68030 card and 16MB RAM, and an 850MB 3.5-inch Seagate hard drive (to replace the 80MB Conner when it failed), a high-density floppy, a Dataflyer SCSI+, a CD-ROM drive, Shapeshifter, and lots of hacks. The 850MB drive died not too long ago, I'm limping along on a 245MB until I get either a bigger drive or a Zip.

But despite the passage of time, that thing is still every bit as workstationey as it ever was. It doesn't have Photoshop, and it doesn't have Internet Explorer, and it doesn't have Command & Conquer. But what it has, it has in style, and it has with spunk. It has a command line environment that gives UNIX a run for its money. It has the PBM utilities to do all the things Photoshop only wishes it could do. It has Internet on it - YAM is better than Eudora in many ways. Oddly enough, the biggest uses for my Amiga are the two things people say the Amiga wasn't designed to do: Internet and word processing. No games. Some graphics. Mostly e-mail, Web browsing, and writing.

As for me, I began this page because I felt like it. Actually, I started this page because USENET sucks and I needed a soapbox. It began more along the lines of rumor reporting, and has since become a place to express my opinions of modern computing and how it's missed the mark. The Rumor Mill sees about 50 visitors a day from all over the world, it's by far the most visited thing on my site. I hear from all manner of Amiga celebrities, editors and staff of several major Amiga magazines, Amiga developers, users, and even PC and Mac people wondering if the Amiga's a viable alternative to the crap they have to tolerate now. And of course, there's all those mysterious microsoft.com hits in the server logs. Someone in Redmond is watching.

This boring story has told you almost nothing about me. Go here to find out more.