Oktyabr’s Notepad

So you really want to know, do ya? Ok, ok… I’m not shy.

I’m somewhere around 40 years of age, last I asked some one; male, American, engaged, married, separated, and divorced all more than once, with three “kids”, two of which are adults doing their own thing.  I recently relocated to the Puget Sound area of Western Washington state after spending several years too long in the dry, dusty south eastern corner of it.

By trade I’m a Teamster employed in heavy highway construction. Short version is that I drive large trucks (mostly) for a living. The work can be challenging, the pay and benefits are pretty good and I get to work outdoors (or at least seen through a windshield) all year around and the scenery is always changing. Those in my line of work (in my area anyway) like to say “we do a full year’s worth of work in 10 months and then get two months off to recover”. This means I usually get some quality home time in the winter months to play around with other things…

As obvious to anyone that has browsed this blog to any degree my primary loves are computers and music and variations of those two things in combination…

Computers have always fascinated me from the time back in the early 1980’s when my High School Math class got a Northstar terminal to play with which was soon followed by Apple IIes and their clones. Since then I have always had computers in my life from old Commodore Vic-20’s, C64s, Amigas and on up to modern hardware.

Today I build myself a new computer pretty much every year and then the hand-me-downs either go to one of my kids, get turned into a family file/print/music server upgrade or sold (and sometimes given) to someone else in my community.

I’ve been running Linux on and off for the last several years and would rate myself as a user with “above average” knowledge of the OS and it’s inner workings but I’m still a long ways away from being a kernel hacker or programmer or… gentoo user

Music is also a very important part of my life. I listen most hours I am awake (with a bit of talk-radio in there too) and my tastes run a very wide range from Classical and Jazz to German Industrial Metal although as I’ve gotten older I’ve noticed that I tend to favor the slower more eclectic stuff. “Downtempo”, “Acid”, “Lounge”, and simply “Jazz” could all be used to describe much of the stuff I like to listen to. Try monkeyradio as one of my favorite internet stations along these lines.

I also like to play at being a musician from time to time as well. I can’t read music or really play any instrument but I’ve owned several synthesizers and have spent many, many hours playing around with pro-audio software too. You can find a few examples of some of the stuff I have done in the past (not really “songs”, per se, but more auditory experiments) at my sectionz.com page.

Outside of that I like to cook, primarily Thai, Japanese and other asian cuisines, and most who know me well would say that I have an obsession with automobiles too… Truth is that I’m easily bored with what I drive and a certain “salesman” aspect in me likes to buy/sell/trade, always looking for a “good deal”. In the last few years my driveway (and occasionally my yard) has contained seven different BMWs, two Porsches, two Mustangs, and at least a half a dozen different 4×4s.

I’ve also got to confess to being a **LIFE LONG GAMER!**  I play them all but computer games are my usual past time, online racing games such as rFactor being my favorite time-waster of late.

Books, cold beer, good friends, and something new to learn every single day also help me stay young

Best,

Oktyabr

P.S. Someone asked me where I got that “name”. Here is the long story made short:

About 10 years ago a friend of mine wanted me to check out a rather popular forum hosted at delphi.com. Before it would let me read any of the posts I HAD to make an account… Thinking that it would be a quick, one-time thing I just picked a name at random… a calender was close at hand and yup, you guessed it… “October” was born.

I used “October” as my online persona for many years after that. It was pretty memorable and remarkably unique. I could be “October” just about anywhere. Well, not any more! Seems others had the same idea… Anyway, recently I had to come up with a different version of it so instead of picking something like “October125″ I decided to try an alternate spelling… “Oktyabr” is the Russian spelling. No, I’m not Russian, but I like the way it looks when printed and it still retains the positive features of the old spelling.

There you have it.