About

About Me

I was goth, now I wear colors.  I was industrial, now I have short hair.  I used to play piano, now I type.

But with each of these lifestyles and changes comes a bit of learning, a bit of experience, an ever-increasing pool of knowledge to pull from.  I still listen to goth and industrial music frequently, I just no longer look like either stereotype.

I like to believe that I have an analytical mind with an appreciation for art, music, and philosophy; an enjoyment of both going out and being social as well as quiet time to myself; a balance between science and magic; a mature and organized life interspersed with spontaneous outbursts of childlike curiosity and glee.

I like science.  I like puzzles — mainly solving and discussing, though I have designed a few for the Perplex City collectible card game: Catcher, Circular, Confounding Cube, NAND, and Primer. I was into the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) scene for many, many years, but stepped back and took a break from it a few years ago.  In the meantime, I have been trying out more local puzzle events such as DASH and Puzzled Pint.

I have been living in Portland for about ten years, but was born and raised in “The OC” (with a short span between the two in Boston.) The people and attitudes in Orange County was just a little too “plastic” for me — both in the physical sense, as in “surgery,” and the social sense. People in the Pacific Northwest are much more “real” and don’t go around with fake bodies or fake attitudes. I love it so much around here that I bought a house in southeast PDX a few years ago.

You might call me a geek, but often that implies that one has never been bathed by the warm glow of the sun in recent years. Quite the contrary! While, admittedly, I have not gone on a proper camping trip in a great many years, I enjoy afternoons out in the wilderness (generally walking/hiking, with the rare bouldering trip thrown in to spice things up).

Contact Information

My email address is “brian” at this domain name.

Stalker Information

For those interested in stalking my online presence, I have compiled a few useful links that should minimize your amount of Googling for my name.

About the Site

Netninja.com has been around since 1997 and has always been a place for me to host my projects, collections of links, and photos. Its most recent incarnation is as a personal blog. The projects seem to come and go — many of the old “hackerish” projects have been dropped as well as a bunch of Windows-based applications. This is partly because of changes in my life — I am not so much “an evil hacker” anymore and no longer use Windows–and partly due to time constraints — I just don’t have the time to support, for instance, some Java application that I wrote 8 years ago.

Syndication

Along with RSS, the blog posts on this site are being syndicated to Twitter and Facebook. This is for a number of reasons.

With Facebook, I have a number of friends that use those services and pretty much constrain their internet activities to those places. They rarely visit blogs directly and would not know an RSS reader if one hit them in the face.

With Twitter, I know a number of people who are savvy enough to use Twitter, but not yet geeky enough to subscribe via an RSS reader.

I used to post as userinfoBrianEnigma on LiveJournal.  All posts here from 2001 through 8pm on 8 April 2007 were imported from LiveJournal, so may make reference to embedded features, such as polls, that exist on LJ but not here.  There were also plenty of comments on those old posts that have since gotten lost.  Well — they still exist on LJ, but were not imported, so will get lost as soon as LJ goes under.  For a while, I simulcast blog posts from here to LJ, but a critical mass of inactivity over there built up, so I switched that off in April of 2008.