About Me

Welcome to my col­lec­tion of para­doxes: a cool geeky guy with my feet firmly grounded, but head in the clouds; 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; I gen­er­ally do not swear, but am not the least bit offended by the use of 4-letter words; a car­ni­vore who eats pri­mar­ily veg­e­tar­ian food; an Eagle scout who does not visu­ally fit the stereo­typ­i­cal clean-cut image; a mature and orga­nized life inter­spersed with spon­ta­neous out­bursts of child­like curios­ity and glee.

I have been liv­ing in Port­land for about seven 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.
* On Twit­ter, I am @BrianEnigma
* I check in around town using Foursquare
* I have a Face­book page, but I only check it about once a week
* I have a Live­Jour­nal Pro­file that I use for read­ing and com­ment­ing
* My pho­tos (and a few videos) are avail­able over on Flickr
* I post book­marks to del.icio.us
* I some­times read news on Digg
* I have a pretty crappy MySpace page
* I watch lots of DVDs, as evi­denced by my Net­flix pro­file
* I don’t really use it, but am also on LinkedIn
* I use a per­sonal Wiki at Stack Over­flow for keep­ing track of notes, con­fig files, and scripts

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 Live­Jour­nal 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 Live­Jour­nal, things are a lit­tle dif­fer­ent, as I actively par­tic­i­pate on LJ.  I like the free­dom of own­ing my own con­tent and host­ing it on my own domain, yet I also like the com­mu­nity built up around LJ.  l log in to LJ under the name Bri­a­nEnigma to read and com­ment.  This blog’s feed is avail­able over there as brianenigma_rss.