About Orinoco

June 1, 1999

Well, you're here. Now, who am I? The picture on the right is for those who like such things. It's a few years old, but that just means I have much more hair and no longer live in that small room on campus.

My 'real' name is Jeremy, although one of my (many) convictions is that names should be fluid. They are labels of identity, and we all have many identities which we shift between in daily life. Orinoco is my name on the net.

Why Orinoco? Many reasons. It's a good word. It's the name of a river, a song, a womble, an RPG character of mine, and has connotations and linkages which harken back quite some way. It conjures the image of flowing water. I like that image. The most direct reasons are the song by Enya, and a suggestion from Buckaroo, who's very, very good at naming things. Most people in RealLife(tm) still call me Jeremy, but I have long term plans.

If you want to EMail me, use this address: . If you are wondering why it's an image and not a convenient hyperlink, it's to stop spammers from trawling my address from my pages and sending me 'make money fast' chain letters. (Alas, hacking them into oblivion is a federal crime.) I apologise. If you're a regular aquaintance of mine, I will have told you my slightly more private redirector address which will follow me for years, and therefore especially do not want to fall into the hands of spammers.

I support free speech, free love, free food, and more than ever, free time. I think the most important thing on the net is the Gutenberg Project. I call the whole electronic shebang the Net, not the Web. The Web is just the collection of hyperlinked documents in HTML. The Net contains and supports the Web. I regularly get pedantic over little irrelevant details.

During the day, I do evil things to electrons in my job as the senior software guy at HRM Consulting. I have "Free-roaming Agent of Chaos" written down on my job description. I work for a cool company. HRMC does lots of interesting things by squishing Human Resources and Information Technology together.

During the night I read many books, consider the universe as a whole, and have long philosophical discussions with my friends about the nature of reality. Sometime I sleep, but never enough. It matters not, I'll get all the sleep I need when I'm dead. I do not have a TV, and this is a source of constant joy except when Bablylon 5 is on.

I write poetry and short stories which are too private to put here. I look at the night sky sometimes and need no reminding that our little planet shines like one of a billion specks of sand thrown into the air and have not yet fallen down. Life is too brief.

If I have one single saying that I would communicate to you, it is this. by Sir Walter Scott:

For me, it's not a motto, but a goal. I do not live by it, but wish I did. We must all have dreams.

Mail me, talk to me if you dare. I'm interested in the strange, bizzare, and unworldly. Mostly this translates to Quantum Physics, Superstring Theory, Astrophysics, Computer Science, and People.

I think all my friends are the coolest people in the world.