About
Shaved head (July 2003)
I'm happily married to one of the smartest people that I've encountered. Kristen spends her days as a science teach for the Chicago Public School system. We have three sons, Joshua, Jonathan and Jacob and they tend to keep us on our toes.
You can reach me via e-mail if you address it to jperkins aht sneer.org
The Web, Development and Sysadmin
I'm a fan of OS X and FreeBSD with the latter running on any server whose administration I'm responsible for. For the past six years, I've mainly developed using PHP but after an unsuccessful attempt to port Rails' active record to PHP I've seen the light and have decided that Ruby and Rails is what I want to be working with.
I have twelve years experience working the Web and during that time have authored a couple of articles (one for sitepoint, one for O'Reilly and Associates), technical edited a book for Sams Publishing (the fourth edition of "Web Publishing with HTML and XHTML") and launched dozens of websites. I advocate for standards compliant markup and hand-coding of markup and CSS.
Working with Derek, Dan and James (sharpest peeps that I've worked with at one place) we launched Pixish which is written in Ruby on Rails. My roles are development and handling the system admin of our servers.
Photography and Motorcycling
Honda Hawk CB400T
Photography is my primary offline passion and I enjoy both the technical and the aesthetic aspects. Presently, I'm using a Digital Rebel XTi with a EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 lens attached.
The best description that I've heard of motorcycling is that it's like riding down a big hill on a bicycle as a kid. Except that it's like that all of the time. Fascinated with motorcycling since reading, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," fifteen years ago, I finally got around to learning to ride two years ago and love it. I currently ride a 1980 Honda CB400T Hawk - an ideal first bike and one perfectly suited for commuting in Chicago. I've been known to glance covetously at the Triumph Scrambler.
The Site
This site is hand-crafted with BBEdit and stored in SVN on my MacBook. I do all of the design and development locally and then push the local site to the production server that hosts this site. I attempt to get the markup to validate as XHTML and CSS and occasionally succeed. The blog is Movable Type powered and uses the Markdown and SmartyPants plug-ins developed and maintained by John Gruber.
There’s an atom feed for the blog available.