My name is Chris Pinard, though I am also known as "Slarti". The nickname comes from my using "slarti" as a username on Unix systems for several years now, and derives from "Slartibartfast," a character from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio/book/television series. Originally from Biddeford, Maine, I've bounced around a bit over the years and am currently living in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
I'm currently in the job market. My resumé avalable online for those who wish to have a look.
I'm a Gweep by inclination, which ends up meaning that I play around with computers and stuff for fun a lot. Sometimes that's writing some code, and sometimes it's running and maintaining computer systems. Gallifrey, my primary server, has run the gamut from personal hardware to hosted virtual server, and Linux to BSD and back to Linux. Panopticon, my graphical workstation for gweeping from the comfort of my living room, has been various Linux/BSD systems in the past as well, but is currently a nice shiny iMac.
This site has what few pictures I maintain, as well as what little "product" I create during long Gweeping sessions and the occasional bout of writing which I can actually piece together well enough to put into words.
Like a lot of geeks, I enjoy comic books. I used to be hugely into DC, but have become disenchanted with them in recent years and have gotten more into the cosmic high adventure stuff that Abnett and Lanning have been doing for Marvel. Other favorites, comics-wise, include Hellboy/BPRD and Atomic Robo, which provide my pulpy doses of snarky non-human regular joes handling menaces of either horror or mad science varieties. Speaking of pulp, I am a huge fan of the pulp style, whether in prose or comics, detective or sci-fi. I dig Hammett and Chandler, as well as the Lensman series. On TV, I enjoy Leverage, Castle, Fringe, and a spattering of other police procedural shows, as well as Stargate and food-type shows like Good Eats and Tony Bourdain's No Reservations.
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."
-- Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996
I advocate strict adherence to W3C specifications in creation and management of Web content. Hence, my pages are written in strict HTML, putting only structural description into my markup, and all presentational concerns are handled by usage of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Currently most of my code adheres to HTML 4.0 Strict, though I have started what little work should be needed to convert to HTML 4.01, and intend to look to XHTML and learn what changes it brings, how it furthers the goals of portable Web authoring and content/presentation separation.
Unsurprisingly, given that the Web is designed to be a dynamic thing, my site is a work in continuous progress. It'll get stuff added, deleted, and updated as I have time and opportunity. It's actually pretty skeletal right now, with a number of different things I'm looking on putting in. For now, though, Share and Enjoy...
