About
Hi. My handle has been Grelbar since about 1997. The origins of the name are as follows: We were playing a table-top RPG with a few friends, and i was supposed to make up a name for my character (An elf dude, that shot arrows with a funky bow), and i came up with Grelbar. Actually, i was aiming for another name, that i tried to recall from some cheesy fantasy book that i had read recently, but i failed, and the mangled lovechild of that failing was Grelbar.
It's pretty good that it actually ended up like that, because it's a unique name. I've been using it ever since, for most things on the web, so it's collected quite a trail of network presence on different sites. So yeah, it's not too much of a "secret identity" in that sense. You could probably get to my name through this handle, but why bother. If a trail is 12 years old, it's childs play for anyone who is trying seriously. I don't have any delusions of privacy. Quoting Steve Rambam in his Hope conference talk: "Privacy is dead".
So a short bit about my self. I'm a twenty-something up and coming professional, with a serious enthusiasm for technology, and a hacker mindset. With that i mean, i always need to know how things work, and also why. Why is something set up in a particular way, and how does it work. I've had this mindset since i was a kid. Some of my earliest memories include opening up an old electric typewriter, i had to have been four or so. We picked it apart, and then ran away, screaming "dynamite!" because we had found a large red condensator, that kind of looked like a cartoon-dynamite.
The very first computers i had, i had to take apart. We made text-roleplaying games when we were in elementary school, using QBasic. We roamed around BBS's in the beginning of the 90's, before there was a graphical www to speak of. We made websites at school in 97, registered hotmail accounts (one of which i still have left!).
Never had a Commodore 64, or a Coleco Adam, or a VIC20, or any of those. I'm not really of that generation. My first computer was probably an 8088, and i've played with most architechtures ever since. Amiga users continue to suck though.
In all, i'm not too much of a programmer, in fact, my skills are rather limited in that area. I do know a load about hardware, and i'm getting pretty good at gnu/linux and bsd, both of which i use on a daily basis. The operating systems i have at home include: OS X, OpenBSD, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, and different flavors of gnu/linux. If it runs with electricity, i'm most likely interested. I'm a total gadget-freak, and a hardware-hoarder.