Who am I?

Hah. Good question! My name is Claire. I’m 26, I’m in that rare breed of girls who are also geeky, and I live in Indiana. I suppose that gets the basics out of the way.

I’m atypical in just about every way. I’m a girl, but I’m not a girly girl (or butch). I’m sort of Christian and definitely Libertarian. I get my entertainment from trolling people on the Internet…especially on IRC.

I have two cats named Sumi and Ninja. Sumi’s about five years old and is an absolute trip. She plays fetch, follows me around the house, and comes when I call her. She’s a total attention whore and is very skilled at playing the “my-owner-hates-me-please-please-take-me-home” card on complete strangers. I adopted Ninja in August 2008 as a playmate for Sumi. She’s about two and a half years old and still very kitten-like compared to Sumi. They play together, and Ninja’s favorite game is to find Sumi, hold her down, and force-groom her.

My music and movie tastes are wildly varied. If you don’t like what I like, or you like what I hate, that automatically means you suck and I rule. That’s how the game works – I don’t make the rules; I just enforce them.

I’m a Grammar Nazi™. To an extreme. I don’t tolerate bad grammar or spelling from anyone, unless English is very obviously not your first language. I take full liberty to edit any comments on my posts in order to correct flagrant errors and/or stupidity. I sometimes make exceptions for hanging prepositions, as sentences sometimes sound awkward written any other way.

What do I do?

I graduated from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis in May 2006 with a degree in Computer Information Technology from Purdue. Not knowing what I actually wanted to *do*, I ended up working for about two years at Cummins Inc. (formerly Cummins Engine Company) as a sort of project manger and support manager. After working there for a couple years, I realized that my true calling was web development. I started looking for work, without much success.

In February 2008, I started dating a guy who lived in West Lafayette. That didn’t work out (on so many levels), but visiting him several times got me thinking about moving out of Indianapolis. Until then, I’d only really thought about living in Indy. In fact, at that point I was literally days away from making an offer on a nice condo on the near North side. I figured I’d just always live in Indy – it’s where I grew up, some of my family was there, and it was familiar.

However, finding work as a web developer isn’t that easy, especially since I didn’t actually have any formal experience, aside from one three-month summer internship at Cummins in 2005. When I looked at what might be available at Purdue University, I was faced with a good number of positions for which I was actually qualified. I ended up getting an interview (and subsequent offer) to work within the Teaching & Learning Technologies division of Purdue’s IT department (ITaP, or “IT at Purdue”).

I worked at Purdue until mid September 2009, when I moved with my then-partner to Fairfax, Virginia, which is part of the greater Washington, D.C. metro area. In February 2010, I started working at a retail Apple Store as a Genius. My mom was a big fan of telling everyone that her daughter is a genius…ahaha. Right now I’m looking for work in the DC area doing Tier II-type technical support work.

What do I have?

Herpes.

I kid, I kid. I’m laughing as I write that.

Sorry. I’ll be serious now. I’m a hardcore computer geek. I used to just be into the software/OS side, but I’ve become more of a hardware geek lately. I own several a crapton of computers, and lots and lots of peripherals.

Let’s see…my main machine is a 2.66GHz Core2Duo that I built. My file server, which currently runs Windows Home Server, is a low-end Core i3 with a three-terabyte storage array, thanks to the awesome drive pooling feature that was yanked from WHS 2008. I also have…

• 1.83GHz Core2Duo HTPC
• 3.0GHz P4 Linux machine
• 1.83GHz Intel Mac Mini
• 1.67GHz Power Mac G4
• 867MHz 12″ PowerBook G4
• 466MHz clamshell iBook G3
• Acer Aspire One
• HP Mini 1000
• Asus eeePC 701
• Dell Latitude E6401
• Apple Macintosh Classic II
• Apple Macintosh SE/30

Oh, and I have a Netpliance I-Opener that I’m in the process of modding with a 400MHz AMD K6-2+ CPU.

Fifteen computers isn’t too many, right?

Right?

I’m also a bit of a wannabe gamer and have a Dreamcast with a single game, a PlayStation 2 with a lot of games (Katamari Damacy and Soul Calibur FTW), a Wii, and a DS Lite and PSP that I use far more frequently than I expected when I originally bought them.

Conclusion

I’m awesome. That is all.