So here's how it is:

I currently reside in Great White North aka Canada, in one of the western provinces known as Alberta, in a city called Calgary. I'm a professional chef by trade and I've been doing it for close to 25 years now. Yes, I cook for a living. I enjoy doing it and it pays the bills quite nicely. I'm also quite good at it and try to keep my ego in check most of the time. If you want a good insight into my profession and the restaurant biz in general, please read Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. It's almost like being there.

In my spare time I'm a big 'ol geek, but I hide it rather well. You could refer to me as a Stealth Geek, if you will. I'm an avid reader and book collector. My tastes tend to run towards science fiction in general, but I have been known to branch out into horror, humour, technology, and some history on occasion. I also watch a wee bit of TV for recreation. Not so much these days due to the ineptitude of the networks and their fixation on crap TV. Hopefully this will change one of these days, but I doubt it. These are some of my favorite shows: The Sopranos, Buffy, Angel, Farscape, Futurama, Freaks and Geeks, The Simpsons, Babylon 5, The X-Files (even though the last two seasons were really harsh), the various incarnations of Trek through the ages (Enterprise did try my patience though during it's run), 24, Oz, Rome, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, MI5, Doctor Who, Torchwood, and of course, Firefly.

My first brush with a computer was a huge IBM monstrosity located in the Physics department at Forest Lawn Senior High in 1978. Since then I have made aquaintances over the years with a Commodore Pet, an Atari 400, a Vic 20, an Apple IIc, and a Commodore 64, before finally settling down with a Dell Dimension 8200 in late 2001. I have also played with a couple of IMacs along the way. Thanks to the Dell though, I finally made my way onto the 'net and have made more than a few good friends online since then. Most of them can be traced through to the original Firefly boards at Television Without Pity back in late 2002 and the Still Flying Yahoo group in early 2003.

If you're curious about Industrial Looniee & Madness (and who isn't really?) here's a bit of backgound:

Way back in the late 70's (1979 to be exact), several of my high school buddies and I decided to start up a Star Wars/Sci-fi fan club. All of us basically grew up on a steady diet of comic books, cartoons, Star Trek, and Star Wars, and aspired to become big-name filmmakers, writers, or artists. A magazine called STARLOG was putting out a communications handbook with was basically a compilation of some of the best of readers letters, movie and tv studio address guides, a fan club directory, a fanzine guide, and where to buy assorted science fiction merchandise. We sent in our address for the club and it was published in The Official STARLOG Communications Handbook Vol 1 in the fall of '79. It made us very happy geeks. What made us even happier was the fact that people actually wrote us and wanted join our little club. From what I recall just over a hundred people inquired about IL&M, and just over a quarter of them joined. We had snazzy membership cards made up thanks to a friend's father who ran a printing shop out in Regina and embarked on putting out a bimonthly fanzine titled The Empire Strikes!. The original title was The Empire Freeeps!, but we only used that for the first issue. We actually got two issues out (and a third one all cut and pasted, ready to go to the printer), but the whole venture sort of imploded in the summer of 1980. Creative differences and teenage angst were the main factors of it's demise.

At the moment I'm trying to dig up all the assorted paraphernalia of this early adventure in Geekdom and archive it on this site. Another friend of mine in California during the same time period also published a Star Wars fanzine called Empire Review. It was a hell of a lot slicker and more polished than what we were doing in Calgary. She was successful at it, and I think she ended up putting out a least four or more issues. I do have copies of the first four along with the original pre-issue. I ended up doing some cartoons for several of those issues and one of the cartoons I did (from one of her ideas) actually ended up gracing one of the office walls at Lucasfilm back in the day. This made me an extremely happy geek when I found out about it. Sometimes I can't help but wonder what my friends and I would have accomplished if the Internet had existed back then. I can just imagine the website we would've came up with...