Software engineer · maker · ex-soldier · ex-cop · unrepentant hobbyist
Welcome to RandomStringOfWords.com — my own virtual oubliette, actively serving content since February 2000. I answer to a few names, I've worn a few uniforms, and I make things with my hands when I'm not making them with code.
Who's writing
Call out using any one of them and I'll turn around. All of them are me — and yet none of them are.
The name I program under, borrowed from history. The original Palamedes sailed with the Greeks against Troy, exposed Odysseus' feigned madness, and got framed and executed for his trouble. He also invented dice and a few letters of the alphabet — clever right up until the end, I guess.
The historical reference →Tescht Vihravendrel Ambjuri'Belshiva — a fantasy character name I've carried for years across every game imaginable, from Warhammer and D&D to EverQuest and World of Warcraft. It usually gets worn down to just Vihra, or Vihr.
My handle for shooters and arcade games. Coined in 1999 when TFC dropped and I became an admin on some servers that were absolute toilets in desperate need of cleaning. "Toilet Duck" was a bowl cleaner back in the '80s. The name stuck.
My real name. A 50-something software engineer and small-business owner with more than 20 years in the field — and the one signing his name to everything the other three get up to.
The full résumé →A life in chapters
My career keeps weaving between two very different worlds — writing software and wearing a badge — with a dot-com sale and a stint in the Army holding it all together.
Right after high school my father got remarried, so I figured it was time to get out of the house and let him and his new wife have a life together without me in the way. I joined the Army for five years as a 98CKP — a signals-intelligence analyst and Korean linguist with a top-secret clearance. The job sounded cool. Mostly I fixed trucks in the motor pool. The Army's overall experience was excellent; the individual minutes sucked. But I met some of the best people in the world and I'm still friends with most of them.
Out of the military, I started my own business on the world wide web and built the very first digital-music metacrawler that searched the internet for MP3s. Written entirely in PERL, it handled 10,000+ queries an hour and got me back into programming after my military hiatus. Two years later I sold Palavista to ChangeMusic Inc. in New York for $330,000 and retired for a couple of years. About two weeks after I sold it, Napster launched. I got out just in time.
Once early retirement got boring, I went into law enforcement — a commissioned patrol officer for two Central Texas municipalities. Part of me misses it: it had the camaraderie of the military and a minor sense of celebrity, the feeling that you were doing something that mattered. (All the while, I never really put the keyboard down.)
Back to code. I spent six years at IBM as a senior UI developer and architect on Rational Build Forge, plus work touching major companies along the way — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Dun & Bradstreet, and Cox Media among them. After IBM I went where I actually like to be — small shops and startups — eventually co-founding Grok Interactive as CTO. My stack has spanned Ruby, Rails, PHP, Zend, JavaScript, Java, AJAX, JSON, XSLT, XML, and most of the alphabet soup in between.
I rejoined law enforcement in Georgia to give back to the community. All told I spent roughly six years in public service through law enforcement before I hung it up for good — the night-shift toll on my marriage settled it. I chose my wife. No regrets.
These days I write software for small teams I believe in, and I make things with my hands the rest of the time. The badge is behind me; the keyboard and the workshop are very much in front of me.
Off the clock
My hobbies include just about anything you can think of. I really enjoy making things — here's a sampling of the rabbit holes I disappear into.
I make or have made armor — chain, leather, and plate — along with bows, crossbows, and clocks. But turning wood is the one that really gets me, and general woodworking right alongside it. It's the kind of work where the material pushes back, and I love that.
I'm an avid gamer — partial to MMOs, though I'm worn out on the endless fantasy trend and quietly waiting for a futuristic space game that doesn't punish me for playing. I read and write (badly, by my own admission), call myself a decent 3D modeler, and own a very nice keyboard I keep meaning to learn. One day I'll play the Chapman Stick too — coolest instrument on Arrakis.
I used to be an extreme paintball player — and by extreme I mean I played a lot. I started in 1987 and went semi-pro, running the master-circuit grind and serving as head field ref for Zap Masters and the Zap International Open. The game eventually drifted somewhere I didn't enjoy, so I mostly stepped away. But for a good long while, I lived on the field.
A few snapshots
Tap any photo to look closer.
In a nutshell
That's me — and of course there's a lot more to know, but you'll have to read the rest
of the site to get it. This place is as much a peripheral part of my brain as it is
anything else. I write this stuff for my own pleasure, not for you. If you find any
enjoyment in my ramblings, then fantastic...
but I did it for me.
Keep in mind, this site is my very own oubliette of rambles, Rants! and stories. If
you get offended by any of it, that's on you.
In the end, my writing style is my own —
be it good, bad, or ugly. I'm the one at the keyboard.
One thing you may notice: I don't use spell-check, and I really should. Sorry about that — please forgive any typos.