I, Faggot: The Page Only 10% Of You Should Have Clicked On
This is a very large photo-enhanced page; somebody set up us the bomb.
September 11, 2001.
A day that will be forever remembered.
Never forget the victims of the World Trade Center,
the Pentagon, and the passengers on the four lost flights.
Please feel free to take one of these and place it on your own website.
TODAY, JUNE 29, 2010...
I am a 45 year old male, stand 5'9" and weigh about 222 pounds. I am an atypical computer
nerd; I don't wear glasses with first-aid tape across the nosepiece, nor do I own a pocket protector.
That's me on the right. Am I looking at porn or examining a new flashlight?
I run with scissors and occasionally play well with others.
My original home was Juneau Alaska, where I spent the first 20 years of my life.
In my teens, I became interested in electronics and lasers; eventually getting into computers as well.
I built my first laser when I was about 12; then bought one from Metrologic about two years later.
I used the lasers to detonate homemade charges placed in dipsty-dumpsters and unused planters.
Thankfully, I don't play with fire anymore. :)
Around this time (1978 or so) I started experimenting with the first generation of small computers;
expensive clunky things that had barely 1K RAM in them but could be programmed by the end-user
for a variety of useless and wasteful applications like calendars and crude games.
When I was 16 I took up with a local band called Chrome Forest and provided their special effects and
laser shows for their local gigs.
Around my 18th birthday or so, I started working for a vending machine company, repairing their machines
and running the video arcade. This quickly evolved into rebuilding the video games, repairing
the games at the hardware level, and doing conversion kits on them - all while keeping the growing
collection of existing machines in good working order.
Right around my 20th birthday, I moved from Juneau to Seattle; worked for a pinball repair place as a technician and
refurbisher for awhile, picked up the odd job here and there;
then when I was around 23, started tending bar for the now defunct Six Eleven Tavern in downtown
Seattle.
Left: Me at 24 with best friend Dan. Looks like I'm already circling the drain. Musta been a rough night at the bar. :)
Right: My last true love, David S. This was taken back in 1991, and since parting, I've been single ever since.
Not everybody has one of these.
This large pewter coin was given to me after being caught by Candid Camera on May 09, 1990.
At the present time, I am on disability for a suspected case of MS. So I use my more abundant spare
time tinkering with lasers and electronic devices, collecting insulators, and running my web sites.
Let's start with that last thing - my websites.
I got on the internet for the first time in February 1999, and it wasn't very long before I had my first web page published.
A simple thing - just a couple of badly-placed pictures and some text, but I was here.
Over the next year and a half, I published more than a dozen fully-fledged websites and free-standing web pages, with topics ranging
from broken toilets, to pet rats
, to baseball, to LEDs
, television commercials and wheelchairs
, and even a couple of memorial pages.
You probably found this page by clicking from a link on what remains of my very first page, which I use as a vector page to this day.
That glass thing on the left - that's another one of my loves: INSULATORS. You know, insulators, those things on the tops of telephone poles you may have shot out as a kid?
I have been collecting them informally since the early 1970s, but only since I've been on the internet did I find out there were organized collectors, clubs, national shows, and dozens of books written
about the silly things. Well, those "silly things" have now pretty much taken over the house. My collection numbers close to 300, in dozens of different shapes, sizes and colors.
I also published a website about them, called "Insulators: The Hidden Obsession" which some of you may find interesting.
Faggots love colorful, shiny things, and I am no exception to this rule.
Here's my other big love: the light emitting diode, or LED for short.
These little lights have been around for nearly 40 years, and live in all kinds of everyday things like coffeepots, computers, telephones, and toys.
They only used to come in invisible infrared, plus red, yellow and a sickly yellowish-green. Now you can find these things in every color of the rainbow, including several
shades of purple and violet!
I also test and rate LED flashlights, much like Consumer Reports, but without their budget. My tests are more brutal, and can include stomping on the lights, flushing them down the toilet,
running over them with my wheelchair, and beating them against a steel rod. Lights which survive all of this rate highly, while those that break, well, they just break.
If you are interested in these flashy colored light things, visit "The LED Museum" the next time you have a few hours to spare.
If you just want to learn about them without all the glitz and glitter, consider visiting Don Klipstein's web page as well. Don has put together a very thorough
and educational set of pages all about LEDs, light bulbs, fluorescent tubes, xenon strobes, how to hack disposable cameras for their electronics, lasers, and a whole lot more.
Here are a couple of my best friends - that's Phillip Buff on the left
and his husband Paul Dexter on the right.
I met Phillip online in the early 1990s when I ran a computer bulletin
board called "The Toylet Bowl", and I met Paul a year or two later
when he became Phillip's main squeeze. These guys live on Seattle's
Capitol Hill (gay mecca, remember?) and they have a house full of
Sugar Gliders, a marsupial animal from Australia, as their housepets.
Here is my long-time (now deceased) friend Paul Casey and
myself, riding our Rascal scooters together at
a Seattle food festival over the summer.
Paul used to run a BBS called "Paul's Waka Waka"
which caters to BIG people and those who
admire them.
He also had a website, which
had been up since 1989 or so.
I met Paul in the
late 1980s and we've been best friends ever
since.
Paul and myself used to live together as housemates. We went out riding our electric wheelchairs together every now and
again when our schedules worked out. Now (as of 05-27-06) I live with my sister in Sacramento CA.
On the left is Primo, a friend/wino buddy (now deceased) I've known since the mid 1980s.
In this picture from the early 1990s, he's standing in front of the 611 Tavern - my former workplace and drinking place - with one of my Gay Pride flags.
Click on the picture to see a larger picture.
On the right is Don Klipstein, whom I consider to be my best "long distance" friend. We regularly exchange LEDs, light bulbs, and other optoelectronic
components and we both run websites about the same kinds of things - light bulbs and LEDs.
In this picture, Don has just latched onto the storage capacitor array of a laser power supply... ouch!
I have a number of other friends and acquaintances, both locally and online via e-mail.
Some are just drinking buddies, some are e-mail buddies, and some can accomplish both (e-mailing while hammered?)
Bryan Hold (Beholder) had a substantial, Java-heavy web site and initially helped me get on the internet.
Many people put a picture of their car on their website.
This burgundy red three-wheeler is my car, so there's the picture.
This is the 2000 Electric Mobility 'Rascal' Scooter.
I use this device every day to get around, from hitting the foodbank or the grocery store,
to hitting the booze huts, or picking up packages at the post office. This beauty does it all,
with grace and style.
Once confined to only the wealthy, now almost anyone with an income can get one of these
things financed. And it's a good thing too, for without my Rascal I would not be able to go anywhere,
not even to the food bank or the post office.
This is the 'Heavy Duty' model, and is designed specifically to tackle Seattle's steep hills and shitty
sidewalk system, unlike my first Rascal which was the 'economy' model that kept breaking under these conditons.
See Hell On Wheels for some great pictures and interesting modifications I have made to both of my Rascals.
Finally, here's the lowdown on what I like and in some cases, what I do not:
I'm what some would call a metalhead - heavy metal music is preferred to most other types.
Bands like Raven, Anthrax, Metallica, Prong, Pantera, Megadeth that I should have grown out of long ago are still on my listening list.
I've been listening to this kind of music for as long as I can remember. Unlike most homosexuals, I do not listen to Barbara Streisand or that lesbian singer that doesn't like her name capitalised (K. D. Lang) .
I also dislike most rap and hippy-hop music - the neighbor (from my apartment prior to 10-10-04) played the stuff constantly, and loud enough to occasionally knock pictures off the wall.
I'm no artist... check out the masterpiece I drew that made it on the world famous Poorly Drawn Lamp Page.
I've had several other "lamps" displayed on this page over the last two years as well, such as these beauties:
(Yeah, they get a bit bigger when ya click 'em)
My choice of pets also gets minority votes: I love RATS. You know, rats, those things that surface in the toilet bowl and chew the wires off your water heater?
Only these rats are the domesticated kind. They don't bite, they can be catbox trained, will come when you call them, and can even play some simple
puppy games. I also have a couple of albino corys in the fishtank.
When it's TV time, I hunt down Star Trek episodes. As many of them as I can cram into my viewing time, and it would be a sin if I missed a Star Trek marathon.
I don't attend the conventions (too expensive, too far away) but I do have a few assorted Star Trek collectibles and toys.
For my sports fix, I lean heavily toward baseball and golf. Apparently, you know you aren't young anymore when you actively seek out golf on television, rather than trying to avoid it.
Football and WWF are just too violent for my tastes. Well, football is OK if it's the only thing on.
Let's see... oh yeah, about my living quarters: it's a small 1-br. apt in downtown Seattle's retail district.
My view is nothing to write home about (wait, I am home!) but I can catch a sunset in the summer months if I go right up to the window
and look to the left. The small, cluttered place is adorned with a dozen or so houseplants, a TV in every room, a functioning Commodore 128, an upright arcade video game,
a smattering of antiques (besides all the damn insulators), some butterflies in glass boxes hanging on the walls, a couple of tapestries that Mom made for me,
lab equipment in the dining alcove, and some crappy brown carpeting, complete with cat pee and cigarette burns, just to add the finishing touch.
Not exactly Martha Stewart Living, but better than living under a viaduct. :)
This small, somewhat cramped space is home to me.
From left to right: my arcade game, a glass tank with my pet rat Veemon in it, my constant companion the TV, some houseplants, blackglass coffee table (this is the first time it's been set out since
the magnitude 6.8 earthquake last winter), and scattered everywhere else including in the window are insulators from my nearly 300 piece collection.
Below the window, if you look closely enough, you may see "The Amazing Insulatortoiletplanterthing", which is a permanently decorated, sanitized
toliet with a peace lily plant growing in the bowl. :)
And this is the other side of the room. It has been turned into a virtual shrine to the Seattle Mariners, as you can see.
This isn't your everyday gay's house.
On the extreme right, you can see a small portion of the area I use for my laboratory, as evidenced by some test equipment and a rat's nest of wires
that can be seen.
Well, that should just about do it for my "This page is all about me" page.
Worm Quartet will probably have a field day writing a song about it and putting it on their next Piss Potty CD, or maybe they'll use it as a theme for a poorly-drawn lamp on their Poorly Drawn Lamp Page.
Anyway, enjoy the sunset, and check out some of the links you might find buried in the text of this page.
The above two photographs show the creation I carried during the 1990 and 1991 Gay Pride Parades.
The BBS represented here is The Toilet Bowl BBS, which was a BBS that I was the sysop of from 07-21-89 through 07-21-99.
This is the Gay Pride flag; obtained in Seattle WA. USA right around 1990.
Yes, it's no big secret that I'm a "homosexicle" (from the movie "Chuck and Larry"); so I have no reason to hide or "stay in the closet" as it were.
I am a 45 year old male, stand 5'9" and weigh about 222 pounds. I am an atypical computer
nerd; I don't wear glasses with first-aid tape across the nosepiece, nor do I own a pocket protector.
At the present time, I am on disability for a suspected case of MS. So I use my more abundant spare
time tinkering with lasers and electronic devices, collecting insulators, and running my web sites.
Here's my other big love: the light emitting diode, or LED for short.
Here are a couple of my best friends - that's Phillip Buff on the left
Here is my long-time (now deceased) friend Paul Casey and
On the left is Primo, a friend/wino buddy (now deceased) I've known since the mid 1980s.
Finally, here's the lowdown on what I like and in some cases, what I do not:
.
