SamSite

I thought that it might be wise to write a little blurb about myself. Originally from a small town in Manitoba, I recently relocated to British Columbia in search of work and a warmer climate. In December 2005, I graduated from Red River College’s Information Systems Technology program in Winnipeg, MB. This burst of post-secondary education focussed on application development, mainly VB.NET, Powerbuilder and Java, however I’ve spent most of my spare time in web development using XHTML, CSS and PHP as my primary languages. Outside of the development sphere, I have talent and professional experience in systems/network administration, database development and UI design - in that order. Some of the other technologies I have spent a considerable amount of time working with include C#.NET, SQL (Microsoft and MySQL), UNIX- and Windows-based operating systems (OS X 10.3+, Ubuntu, Red Hat, OpenSUSE, Slackware 12+, SCO UNIX, Windows 98/2k/XP/Vista/7/Server), Adobe Creative Suite (including former Macromedia products), the GIMP, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org as well as various PHP software suites such as Joomla, Drupal and - most extensively - Wordpress.

There isn’t one particular religion or political party (is there a difference nowadays?) I affiliate myself consistently with but that doesn’t mean that I am neither spiritual nor political. That being said, my federal elections vote lies with the New Democratic Party for the time being - although it does depend on the MP running. The NDP drew me in with their stance on drug laws, green policy, labour laws and military usage. If I could change one thing about the Canadian political system, I would launch a campaign to educate voters on other voting systems (e.g.: STV, Mixed Member Plurality) and see if we can’t start electing more representative governments.

I believe open source software creates better software but the open source community is too full of zealots, fanboys and hate-mongers for my liking. This leads me to split my work up among tools that do their job well: Windows 7 and Slackware 12.2 for operating systems, Wordpress to power the blog, Dreamhost for their rockin’ cheap green Linux servers, PuTTY to manage my severs and Google Chrome for working with web interfaces.

I can be reached via e-mail anytime (shaun at samsite dot ca) or by posting a comment anywhere on the blog.