In the year 3030 everybody wants to be a DJ
Who are you?
My name is Steve Cook. I live with my sweetie in suburban Washington, where I work for a consulting company doing web things. DC has many things to recommend it, but I wish I lived in Baltimore.
Are you the Steve Cook I know?
It's an awfully common name. I attended Oakland Mills High School in Columbia, Maryland, and Brown University, in beautiful Providence, Rhode Island, and spent a few years living in Berkeley, California. Do you know me from any of those places?
Why does this site exist?
Originally, I had written this: "Well, it mainly exists as a home for projects I'm working on or plan to work on -- I'm not under the impression that it will be a great draw to others, but since the work I do is mainly scripting-language-related, it provides a nice sandbox for me to play in. And I do write things now and again -- even if one can't be Shakespeare, isn't it nice to have a room of one's own?" But really, the collection of wee bitty essays I've been writing in the guise of a weblog has taken over as the focus of the site.
What on earth is a "snarkout"?
The Snark is a movie theater in two wonderful books by author, NPR raconteur, and general weirdo Daniel Pinkwater. "Snarking out" is the art and science of sneaking out after one's bedtime to go see the late show at the Snark; the term is used by the Snarkout Boys, one of whom is a girl named Rat. If you haven't read The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death or its lesser but still-quite-excellent sequel The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror, get yourself to a bookstore and order Daniel Pinkwater's two anthologies of young-adult novels.
Umm. Okay. But why are you a snarkout?
When I was at Brown, there was a fun little hack available that let you set up one or more email aliases if you were so inclined. I was "sassy@brown.edu", which was all well and good except for the fact that the aliasing program didn't check for duplications. Do you know how many people wanted to be sassy@brown.edu in the mid-Nineties? I wanted an alias that would be slightly less prone to turf fights, and "snarkout" fit the bill. It's got a ring to it, doesn't it?
How do you know all this stuff?
I don't. I use Google and a small army of research gnomes to disguise my ignorance.
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