photo
Jordan Sissel
geek

Mon, 26 Jun 2006

About me:

My name is Jordan Sissel, and I'm a geek.

Hurray, a picture of me! In short one paragraph: I'm a hacker. My hack projects don't always deal with computing. I tinker, I fiddle, I break, and I build. Doctors call it Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I call it life.. My style is a bit of charisma, a bit of dork, a bit of shy, and a bit of spontaneity held together with duct tape and super glue and sprinkled with a healthy dose of uncertainty.

How did I get here? (aka, the path to geek)

Before I went to RIT (college), I knew precisely squat about Unix, Linux, Open Source, Free Software, the whole shebang. That all changed when I came to Computer Science House. I quickly was flooded with various buzz words; people trying to sway my tender, fragile, Windows-weenie mind towards someone's favorite *nix. I ended up becoming fond of FreeBSD over the alternatives Linux had to offer. Later, I discovered the wisdom of my choice: Linux sucks. Turns out that everything sucks, it is only to which degree a particular item sucks that determines it's value. I tend to use the thing that sucks least for a particular task.

Throughout my time at RIT, I've learned more about computing outside of class than I would ever have in class. I've found that structured academia is a poor substitute for self-guided exploration.

I've been running FreeBSD as my desktop OS since 2002 and have foregone windows with the exception that I have a game craving to feed. Now that I have an xbox360, I don't game much on the PC anymore. Well, except for nethack :)

So where am I now? I've landed myself a snazzy job at Google as a cluster ninja. I also write thousands of lines of code and play with lots of software in my own pursuit of knowledge. Most of my productive and research efforts can be found on this website in the form of articles, projects, code snippets, oneliners, and other research.

However, when I'm not entrenched writing code or doing research, I try to spend my time with my very loving girlfriend fiancée. Beyond those interests, I like biking, swimming, playing ice hockey, rollerblading, skateboarding, and rocking out (whatever that entails). I love music, and I'm learning to play guitar.

About this site's name:

To fully encompass my dorkiness, I made perl help me pick a domain name. Read about how I picked it here. The fact that 'semicomplete' is a valid sed(1) expression further illustrates my dorkiness.

About this site:

I figured 'semicomplete' is a fairly good description of me and my pursuits. Most of my personal projects never get finished becuase the goals were achieved long before completion of the project, and my search for knowledge (mostly in computing) is also never-ending. Anything I learn will be written on this site, given the opportunity.

Contact me:

AIM:
PsiKronic
Email:
jls at this domain

Stuff I like:

Browser:
Firefox
Editor:
vim
MUA:
nmh
OS:
FreeBSD
Shell:
zsh (or ksh when that's not available)
Window Manager:
ion
Languages:
C, Perl, Python
Terminal Emulator:
xterm

Comments: 9 (view comments)

Permalink: /static/about
posted at: 18:47


9 responses to 'About me:'

Jesse Zbikowski posted at Tue Sep 26 19:42:09 2006...
This is Jesse from FooCamp.  Let me know if you are going to Yahoo HackDay and/or want to collaborate on a hack.

http://upcoming.org/event/101629

logadmin posted at Fri Jan 26 11:10:13 2007...
Ey, Great page full of a lot of useful resources I have found.
We have similar interests except for the OS.
I'll follow your posts and your good semicomplet projects. ;)

Regards.

logadmin posted at Fri Jan 26 16:28:26 2007...
Ey, Great page full of a lot of useful resources I have found.
We have similar interests except for the OS.
I'll follow your posts and your good semicomplet projects. ;)

Regards.

e_f posted at Wed Jun 13 01:09:15 2007...
psi you are too smart :) congrats on all you seem to have going for yourself though.

-shoes

Todd posted at Fri Aug 3 14:22:18 2007...
Hi Jordan, I found this page sprawling around Google. I too am a programmer, cool resource you have here!

Congrats on the job at Google, that sounds exciting. Maybe your next move should be to create plugins (like the domain picker) for Firefox, do you create any plugins for that browser at the moment?

Best,
Todd

bigmamma posted at Wed Oct 3 14:32:22 2007...
ILVE YOU BLOG, SITE OR WHATEVER THIS IS? HOW COME MENTION IN YOUR CAREER ABOUT YOUR WONDERFUL MOM AND DAD?

Shawn Mike posted at Sat Apr 19 06:52:58 2008...
Interested In Paid Text Link Advertisement!

Hello,

I am a webmaster by profession just like you. I came across your site "http://www.semicomplete.com" while looking for some material for my site. I must say, you have done exemplary work on your site. I would like to make you a business offer.

I am principally interested in buying a number of text-links on your site.
Let me know if you would like to hear more of this.

Warm regards

Peter Kehl posted at Sat May 3 19:35:34 2008...
Hi Jordan,

I wanted to subscribe to your blog, particularly
http://www.semicomplete.com/blog/tags/firefox. I use Google Reader in Firefox. But when I click at the RSS icon in the address bar, it tries to subscribe me to http://feeds.feedburner.com/semicomplete/main - but I don't see a way to subscribe just to a tag. http://feeds.feedburner.com/semicomplete/firefox or http://feeds.feedburner.com/semicomplete/tags/firefox doesn't work.

Any idea, please help.

Jordan Sissel posted at Sat May 3 19:42:40 2008...


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