I'm CowboyNeal, professional Unix nerd and hobbyist hacker. Despite my best attempts, I'm most famous for being a Slashdot poll option. During my time at Slashdot, I did a lot more than just appear in polls. I wrote code, administered servers, helped produce our podcasts, and curated the site as an editor for several years. I've also done a fair amount of freelance work since, and a few folks out there were unlucky enough to have me as a college lecturer. In my spare time, I am a FreeBSD and MacPorts port maintainer. This is the part where I'm supposed to endorse one operating system over another, but lately I've been using FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X, and even Microsoft Windows concurrently. At least I kicked my Solaris habit!

I don't spend a lot of time, if any at all, on social networks. It's not that I'm antisocial, it's just that I don't want to spend time on Facebook or Twitter when I could be doing other things. When I keep in touch with folks I prefer to either email them, or pick up the phone and talk to them. If you want to drop me a line, you can email me at any address at this domain. Please forgive me for not spelling it out in full here, but I receive more than enough spam as it is.

I've set up my own GitWeb, and have been slowly checking in a few things I've written. There's not much there yet, as I'm looking into how to preserve the pre-git history of a few of my projects, but over time I'll be adding more things to the repository.

I wrote a pair of Irssi Scripts to make URL shortening easier while on IRC. There's one for rdr.to, for people who don't like being tracked, and another for goo.gl, for people who do. Both require an Irssi compiled with Perl support, and the appropriate Perl modules installed. I haven't been successful in getting them into the irssi-scripts package, so I've hosted them here for anyone who wants them. Why aren't they in the irssi-scripts package? It could be any number of reasons. It could be the extraordinary number of Perl modules required to use them, or the fact that there's already a plethora of URL-shortening scripts in there already. These two are simply unique because they're made by me for services that aren't already in the package. If it's any assurance, my IRC buddies like them.

Neal Leon Cassady (February 8, 1926 ‐ February 4, 1968) was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic movement of the 1960s. He served as the model for the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road. Cassady lived briefly with The Grateful Dead and is immortalized in "The Other One" section of their song "That's It For The Other One" as the bus driver "Cowboy Neal."

"Cassady is revved up like they've never seen him before, with his shirt off, a straw version of a cowboy hat on his head, bouncing up and down on the driver's seat, shifting gears - doubledy-clutch, doubledy-clutch, blamming on the steering wheel and the gearshift box, rapping over the microphone rigged up by his seat like a manic tour guide, describing every car going by." Tom Wolfe

n.

 

[Sun, from William Gibson's {cyberpunk} SF] Synonym for {hacker}. It is reported that at Sun this word is often said with reverence.