About Me
I'm Shamus. I'm a 50-something-year-old computer geek who was born and raised in the central Puget Sound region of the Pacific Northwest.
Why "Shamus"? Well, back in pre-Internet BBS days when all we had were dial-up modems, I signed up for one board that was running a flavor of Unix on an IBM PC clone platform, Eskimo North by name. I was still new to BBSing and the sit asked me to create a "handle", a nickname for myself (like the C.B radio people used, which I was one of back in the day). I'd just read two books, The Story of the Irish Race, and Hooray for English! (A Book About Yiddish) by Leo Rosten.
First I went looking for a nice Gaelic name for myself (I'm of primarily Scots-Irish extraction) but they were all too long and difficult to spell. So, combining the two books in my mind, I picked Shamus: kind of a blend between the Yiddish word "shamus" and an alternate spelling of Seamus ("James" in the Irish).
Why "Shamusland"? Well, I originally created this domain name for a single personal web site, which was done entirely in plain old HTML. I had to think of something for a domain name. Shamusland is what I came up with. By the way, that site was originally meant to contain information about Seattle for newcomers and visitors: this site is a rebirth of that original idea.
Why .org rather than the more common .com? Originally, .com was for comercial domains, .net for network and Internet service providers (ISPs), and .org for (especially non-profit) organizations, .edu for schools and colleges, .gov for government sites, .mil for U.S. military sites. Nowadays .com, .org and .net are free-for-all domains meaning that anybody can use these top-level domains (TLDs). But I wanted to stick to the old standard, just on principal.
These days I have several sub-domains as well as two or three other unique domains. Check out http://www.shamusland.org to see a list of all of my sites.
I am currently (as of October 2008) between jobs, eking out a living by building content management system (CMS)-based websites for people. I was led to rediscover Drupal CMS, which this site is based upon, when searching for a platform on which to build a multilingual news magazine's website (which work is still in progress).
I like to cook, eat and drink, to read, to listen to music, and to flirt with my overseas Internet girlfriend (a cute Filipina). I DJ on two Internet radio stations: Party FM (http://www.partyfmradio.net) and AoN Network Radio (http://www.aon-network.com). You can hear my shows on Thursday evenings and Sunday afternoons.
