skurfer.com

I'm Rob. I believe tubing is a rough water sport and it's possible that I'm down with P.E..

Random Quote:
"You have traded freedom not even for a bowl of soup, but worse, for the spoken empty feelings of others who say that you deserve to have a full bowl of soup provided by someone else." - Richard Rahl

About this site…

Let's start with my domain name, skurfer.com, in case you came here via some search and you're thinking "'the fuck is this? Some guy's personal web site?" I learned how to skurf in 1988. Ever since then skurfing has been my favorite recreational activity and when I discovered the Internet, I always thought it would be a cool name to have. When I got around to registering a domain in 1999, it was still available, so… there you go. For those interested in skurfing, I do eventually plan to have some information here. I own 6 boards that show the evolution from the original Skurfer, to the modern twin-tip compression molded wakeboards. Now, about that word, "wakeboard". You may have heard this sport more commonly referred to as "wakeboarding" (as in by every single person since 1993). I don't participate in that crap. When my friends and I got into this sport, the Skurfer was the only board in existence, and so it was called skurfing. I see no reason to change that. Call it giving credit where credit is due, or nostalgia, or whatever. The other word is perfectly acceptable as a noun, but not as a verb. By the way, I'm stubborn.

I'm a computer nerd. This nerdhood pays the bills, but I also enjoy it on my own time. There's always room for improvement with computers. Always some new shortcut or cool setting to discover. In fact, when everything is stable and working great with my computer, I often feel like "Well, now what am I supposed to do with it?" I've used all sorts of operating systems, and if you really wanna know, the best by far is one called NeXTstep. NeXTstep supported more than one mouse button, had a graphical web browser (and the first ever web browser), an e-mail client that let you send pictures and even record a voice message, it let you drag-and-drop just about anything to just about anywhere, and it was very stable. Sounds like Windows, right? Well, Microsoft is getting close, but I'd like to point out that these features were being enjoyed by NeXT users while the rest of the world was getting excited about Windows 3.0 - at least 10 years before Windows XP. These screenshots should give you some perspective as to what the competition was like in the late 80s. In 1997, Apple bought what was left of NeXT and adopted the greatest OS ever for their next-generation system and renamed it Mac OS X (although, if you ask me, it was NeXT that took over Apple). I primarily use a Mac now, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, but... much like my refusal to accept the term "wakeboarding", I refuse to think of myself as a Mac user. I mean, I can accept that it's now called Mac OS X and that it's now owned by Apple. Apple took something great and has, for the most part, only made it better. I take issue with some of the changes, but there are no deal-breakers. But considering how absolutely God-awful the previous Mac OS was, I'm hesitant to tell people that I'm a Mac user, because almost no one understands the difference between switching now and switching in 1999. Being a Mac user in the 1990s had nothing to do with making an informed choice. You just had to drive a Volkswagen, vote for Democrats, bathe whenever you got around to it, and pass your time by thinking about how superior you are to everyone else (and have an inexplicable tolerance for a mouse with only one button and a computer that locked up every 20 minutes). I guess the best way to sum it up is this: I didn't "switch" to Apple… My OS did.

Some stuff for the technically inclined can be found over on my projects site.

E-mail the (me). If you want, here is my PGP public key.