As I was walking through a life one morning
the sun was out, the air was warm, but
Oh, I was cold
And though I must have looked half a person,
to tell the tale, in my own version,
It was only then that I felt whole.
My name is Dan Dickinson. My full name is Daniel White Dickinson. I was born on D-Day (that's June 6th, for those unfamiliar) in 1980, thus allowing for a lifetime of comparisons between my initials and the observance of the day. My last name is frequently misspelled as Dickenson, which can lead to me shouting "DICK! IN! SON!" irately. I am indirectly related to the poet Emily Dickinson.
For reasons I'm not quite sure about, I don't like being called Danny. A partial trace can be made to the fact that I was tortured by one of my uncles growing up with loud, out-of-tune renditions of "Oh Danny Boy", but I've just never been much for names that end in double-consonant-y.
Despite it being one of those things you're supposed to know, for much of my life I had no recollection of which exact hospital it was I was born in, or the town it was in. My parents keep trying to tell it to me when my lack of memory of it comes up, but I just can't seem to find a need to commit this to memory. Upon applying for my passport, I finally memorized it.
I started playing video games before I entered kindergarden. The first arcade game I remember playing is Journey, featuring the band of the same name. My first gaming system was an Atari 2600, followed by (in order) a Game Boy, an SNES, a Playstation, a Game Boy Color, a Game Boy Advance, a Playstation 2, a Gamecube, a GBA:SP, an Xbox, a Nintendo DS, a PSP, and an Xbox 360. If you can't tell, I'm an avid gamer.
My family moved three times - two houses in New Jersey, two in upstate New York - finally settling on Trumansburg, NY, which is not far from Ithaca. No one recognizes the village of Trumansburg, despite being the home of the MOOG Synthesizer. Thus, you will often hear me just say I was from Ithaca. If you want to get really pedantic and point out that I actually lived in the town of Hector, on the borderline of a village called Mecklenburg, I would likely punch you in the mouth for the sake of brevity.
Upon arriving in Trumansburg, my first day of school was notable only as I had moved in shortly after another student named Dan had left. I was quickly dubbed "the replacement Dan". This was moderately depressing. However, it remains unclear to me if this is a better or worse situation than I had to deal with in third grade, where there were four Dans in the same homeroom.
I made my first friend in Trumansburg shortly after moving by asking who else had a Game Boy. The only boy who raised his hand immediately became my best friend for the next ten years.
I first took the SATs when I was in 6th grade, as part of a "gifted" program. I scored a combined 840 on it. Later, I would do much better.
In middle school, I took an interest in what was then the Fay's (now Eckerd) Drug Quiz, a statewide competition involving anti-drug questions. My interest in the competition was less in the anti-drug nature (see below) and more in the game show format. After two years of losing in the school finals, we managed to win and proceed on to regionals in Ithaca. We lost in the finals there, but due to seeding, we were able to proceed to the state qualifiers. We won all three rounds and proceeded to the state championships, where we were defeated by faulty buzzers by the team who would shortly thereafter win the entire shebang. Years later, I would see our team picture in promotional flyers for the some anniversary of the competition. My only reaction was to laugh.
In 1993, my Dad brought home a Mac SE/30 from work. I immediately stopped using my PC clone and started using the Mac. I have not owned a PC since, although I have now worked myself through five more Mac machines, including a Performa 6214CD, a Power Mac G3/233, a G4 Cube 450, and an iMac G4 800. I currently use an iMac G5. I should be on another machine shortly.
I first got online in 1995, which was 9th grade. Prior to that, I had two years of local BBS experience. In the first year I got online, two particular people I met would stand out a bit from the rest. One, who I got along smashingly with, would become one of my best friends. I would take her to the prom, fall out of contact for nearly three years during college, and then reconnect and grow back to where we were almost instantly. The other fought with me like crazy and didn't like me at all. We would later get married.
My first web page also appeared online in the summer of 1995. URLs you may have found me at include:
- http://www.spidergraphics.com/remy/ (1995-1996; one design)
- http://www.lightlink.com/remy/ (1996-1998; at least three major redesigns, including "Words", "Blue Planet", and "remy.net")
- http://dwd11.resnet.cornell.edu (1998-1999; one design, "The Dan Dickinson Foundation")
- http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/dwd11/ (1999-2000; one design, "More And Faster")
- http://remy.csoft.net/ (2000-2003; beginning of blog format, using homegrown tools, Drupal, and Movable Type)
- http://vjarmy.com/ (2003-Present; all Movable Type)
The first version of my web page, like many other web pages at the time, was created out of pictures found on other web sites and links to what are now laughably common sites such as Yahoo. One of the pictures near the top was a screen capture of Keanu Reeves in Johnny Mnemonic, pulling a silver visor over his head. Not long after I put up this web page, a friend of my mom's told her she had visited my page and saw that I was a "pot head" - mistaking the picture of Keanu for me and the visor as some sort of pot. This would begin a trend where my parents were worried about what was on my web page.
For three years of high school, I had an independent study to develop the school's web page. I spent most of the time wandering around the computer lab. A good chunk of the pages on the site haven't changed since I wrote them.
I briefly dated a Jehovah's Witness in high school. I then proceeded to rebound back and forth with said Jehovah's Witness for the better part of a year and a half. It was a learning experience, to be kind.
Despite Tompkins County having an astronomically high rate of recreational drug use (large stoner population, nothing to do, etc), I have never once smoked pot, taken mushrooms, dropped acid, or used any other illegal drugs recreationally. I'm not even much of a drinker - I have never once been drunk in my life - which leads me to not be terribly fun at parties. I apologize for this fact in advance, should you be in the process of inviting me to a party right now.
Inspired by a wall of dumb quotes said by the students of one of my teachers, I began writing down particularly insipid things said by the self-proclaimed smartest guy in my grade. The notebook became notorious, and eventually made it onto my webpage. Years later, I would start keeping a general quotefile. There would be an informal competition to be on it for much of college.
I applied to six schools in college. I was rejected at one (MIT), waitlisted at one (CMU), accepted to four (John's Hopkins, Cornell, RIT, RPI). I had scholarships for free rides to the latter two; I picked Cornell due to my growing love for the area - also the 50% break in tuition from having parents that worked there.
As I was starting to fret at the end of high school about what I would do for employment for the summer, I was emailed out of the blue by a professor at Cornell who had been given my name through a slightly convoluted chain of people; the job paid extremely well for my level of experience and gave me more than enough spending money in the summer. This would start a strange trend where I would only be able to land jobs through existing connections, and never successfully complete a hiring process entirely on my own.
While I went to Cornell for my undergraduate degree, I was heavily involved in the Cornell Concert Commission. I ran the security crew for a year and a half, and was Productions Director for a semester (as a replacement for a friend leaving the university). I have numerous amusing anecdotes about Moby, Bob Dylan, Guster, No Doubt, Cake, Rahzel, Jurassic 5, Run DMC, Biz Markie, and plenty of others. There is so much anecdotal material, that I'm inclined not to type them up, as they'll probably outnumber the ones about my life.
I was also involved, briefly, in the Cornell University Program Board. The most notable thing I did is run security for the first stop on Kevin Smith's speaking tour which was turned into a DVD. As I had a reasonable role in the production of the event, I ended up in the credits. This, of course, means that I eventually ended up in IMDB.
During my sophomore year of college, my involvement with an online community came to a somewhat abrupt end as someone faked a suicide and I promptly failed a test after worrying about it. This is the only instance in my life where I can remember having a serious stress-related breakdown.
Also during sophomore year - unrelated to the failure previously detailed - I was warned at the beginning of the fall semester that if I did not bring my math grades up, I would not be allowed to affiliate as a CS major. I worked my ass off, and managed to do considerably better - yet come Winter break, I was still denied entry to the major. This marked the only time I've ever gotten a migraine from an email. A week later, I would walk into the associate dean's office to talk about my options only to discover through the conversation that they had incorrectly written down my last math grade. I repeat: the Computer Science department of a prestigous Ivy League university had written down my grades wrong. After quickly recalculating my average, I was extended a conditional affiliation. I kept it, although not without losing a tremendous deal of respect for everyone in the administration of the department.
Again, also during the Sophomore year, I started a telecommuting internship with Freeverse Software, a Mac gaming company that had played an influential role in my game development during my teenage years. Freeverse would have a larger role in shaping the rest of my life four years later.
Over the summer between the Junior and Senior year of college, I proposed to Katie at the booth of the company I worked at, at Macworld Expo New York. The engagement was done spur of the moment, while MacAddict staff filmed it. They would later have the tape ruined on the flight home.
Senior year of college, I got into Dance Dance Revolution. About four months later, I got hooked on Beatmania (Konami's very related DJ simulation game). A year after that, I would begin playing Beatmania IIDX, the somewhat evolved version of Beatmania. It has eaten up a lot of my time.
Katie and I were married on August 3rd, 2002. The honeymoon was in New York City, which would help serve as a catalyst for us to move there in late 2003. While there, we would (jokingly) attempt to go to Britney Spears' shitty restaurant, NYLA, only to be turned away at the door because "they don't like it when the gentlemen wear sandals". They were very respectable sandals, for what it's worth - certainly more respectable than the crap Britney's been known to wear. Taking the taxi back to the hotel, the cab driver offered to call us a lawyer he knew when he heard about the story.
Three days after we returned from our honeymoon, we decided to move back to Ithaca. Through a series of bizarre circumstances, we went from having no hope and no job prospects to living on our own and being self-sustaining within a month. Again, I lucked into a job telecommuting for Freeverse Software. It paid enough to get by in Ithaca.
At some point in early 2003, I became a moderator at ddrfreak.com, the largest North American DDR community site. After many months of coping with the board, I grew (as many have) to have a high level of disdain for the place. As such, I steered the yearly April Fools prank (somewhat legendary on DDRFreak) for 2004 to involve a month-long process, culminating in every user having moderator privileges. The results are legendary for those people who have been around long enough to remember it. It was enough effort - and fun - to lead me to the conclusion that nothing will ever top it. As such, I have had no interest in April Fools Day since that day.
About three months after we had our apartment, Katie started desiring a pet. She was unable to decide which small animal she wanted - be it a bunny, a cat, a fishtank, etc. I have never been much of a pet person, much to the chagrin of my parents. While randomly browsing the Ithaca SPCA site, I ran across a picture of a very adorable cat. Five days later, we had a new friend. He is a constant source of joy, love, laughter, and torn fabric. Also, poop.
In late spring of 2003, I was asked by Freeverse if I would be interested in possibly relocating closer to the office in NYC. I said I would be interested, pending Katie being able to land a job and our collective salary being enough to live on. Strangely, Katie fell into a strong lead almost immediately and had a job landed by the end of July.
While trying to find an apartment, our first attempt took us on a long walk through one of the most unsavory parts of Brooklyn. At the end of our walk was a horribly misadvertised apartment. We were crushed, and honestly started to wonder if we would be able to even move. Amazingly, our next trip back to NYC lead us immediately to a lovely, inexpensive, perfect basement apartment in Astoria. We are still living there nearly three years later.
Shortly before we moved to New York City, I interviewed on a whim with the Office of Academic Computing at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University. The first interview was conducted with no particular position in mind. The process would last a year, consisting of approximately five interviews, two trade shows on opposite coasts, and a death. The day after my 24th birthday, I accepted a position as an e-learning server administrator. I am still working there.
In January of 2004, I went to San Francisco for the first time in my life for a my fourth Macworld trade show. While there, I met roughly twenty-five people I had known online for an extended period of time. Many of these friends who came to visit me were PC users who saw the daily Halo tournament and promised to wipe the floor with the Mac users. Each one lost.
Towards the end of 2004, I became interested in documenting my daily life through photography. After a combination of abusing an old Olympus digital camera and overusing the camera in my SideKick for 6 months, I received a very small Cybershot T7 for my 25th birthday. Two months later, Katie would also be bitten by the bug and we purchased a Powershot A95 for her. Three months later, our thirst would prove unquenchable as we embarked on buying our first digital SLR. As a result of all of this, you will find that I have a camera on my person around 90% of the time. While the good photos routinely appear on my blog, you can find them all on my flickr account.
In December of 2004, I was given about a week's notice before being thrown on a plane and flown to New Orleans for a conference about a piece of software I had never used before, was only barely knowledgable of, and had no ties to the developer community. I did, however, get to stay in a W hotel and make my first trip into a casino. I had beignets and coffee au lait on the Mississippi River. I also engineered myself some free candy.
I have participated in a photoblogger snowball fight in Central Park after a massive blizzard, in negative wind chills. It was worth the pain.
In June of 2005, I returned to San Francisco for the third time in two years. The keynote in which Steve Jobs announced Apple's switch to Intel chips fell precisely on my 25th birthday. To make up for the somewhat distressing fact that I was marking my quarter century on this earth, I buried myself in meetups with some of the greatest friends I could ever hope to have. I was entertained with Tucker Carlson replicas made out of onions, edamame, imitation action figures, strange arcade games, and Carls Jr. cheesecake. Some of these people I had never met before, at least not face to face - but I honestly forgot this each and every time.
In September of 2005, we had booked a trip to visit New Orleans for a weekend vacation. Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city roughly a week and a half before our trip was planned. We don't seem to have a lot of luck in planning vacations. On the way home from a rerouted trip to Ithaca, we flew on September 11th into JFK. I enjoy destroying superstitions.
In October of 2005, I became a fan of a little NYC comedy thing known as Channel 102. I have taken up providing random technical knowhow on the message boards for no good reason.
On July 1st, 2006, I received a promotion to the title of Technology Services Analyst. This has not made describing my job function any easier.
Life is strange.