http://www.trygve.com
Age - How old are you now? When did you start your site?
37. I started the site when I was 35. It's hard to believe
that it really was only two years ago, considering how it's
become integrated into my daily life.
Marital Status?
Single, never married; never quite made it to the
"living with a significant other" stage before my
potential victim's ... er ... SO's "aiiigh! run away"
reflex kicked in.
Occupation - What kind of work do you do?
Someday I hope to come up with a good, short answer for that one;
"programmer" is what I put on my tax forms (primarily mathematical
modelling, analysis, and optimization of large-scale telecommunications
systems). When I'm not writing code, I'm a writer, systems
administrator, hardware geek, movie villain, and entrepreneur.
I try to start at least one new business per year--but not too many
more than that; they have a way of getting out-of-hand much more
than peanuts or potato chips do.
Hobbies - What do you like to do, besides keep this site?
Weightlifting/bodybuilding, long-distance bicycling, electrical
engineering and design (that probably counts as a "hobby" since
I haven't quite gotten around to starting up any companies to
produce and market any of my designs), collecting far too much
junk for my own good (old books, knick-knacks, antique furniture,
and assorted computer, stereo, and video equipment)
Location - Where are you from? Where are you now?
Originally, I'm from Mankato, Minnesota, but I lived there for
less than a year, so I don't remember it too well. I've lived
in Colorado almost all my life; for a long time I was out in
the "middle o' nowhere" southwest of Denver, but over the last
few years, "somewhere" (in the form of creeping suburbia) has
been oozing around me, so now I'm on a plateau of "nowhere"
surrounded by a sea of almost identical suburban homes.
Why did you start writing your Web site?
There were several reasons, not least of which is that I suck at
keeping up with email; someday I'll discover whatever secret it
is that the rest of the world has for doing it, but I started out
by converting some of the most-often-requested documents I've
written (FAQs, humor pieces, etc.) into HTML so that people could
snag them off the website instead of waiting for me to mail them
out.
Apart from that, a website is a sort of "message in a bottle" tossed into the cyber-sea, and you never know who will decide to pick it up or what they'll think about what you'd chosen to put in your message.
I thought about building one for years before I finally did it, mostly because it irrevocably "outed" me on the net. Even though "Trygve" is a male name, in the US, it's not a common one and people who knew me only from my writing were free to invent whatever mental image they wanted just from my words--and one of the things I found most interesting about the world of electronic communication is how differently people would respond to what I'd written depending on whether their mental image of me was male or female, or whatever other assumptions they might have made about who I was, entirely unrelated to what I'd written.
Why do you write a site about you?
It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it...?
There's the "ego"/"personal emotional issues" side: the fact that I can put a slice of my daily personal life out there for people to view and have people find it interesting enough to look at it is a small ongoing personal triumph. One of the qualities I like most about the web and about having a purely personal site is that it *is* entirely voluntary and reader- driven, so I don't feel like I'm imposing on other people's personal "information space" by putting the site out there and at the same time, it's personally gratifying that people do take the time to look through it.
One thing I recommend a lot is taking a few moments to build a "favicon.ico" file; I've gotten good enough at it that I might just whip up a bunch to make available on-line for people who would want one but don't care to take the time to create their own.
What the "favicon.ico" file does is to give your site its own custom icon in the favorites folder of someone who bookmarks your site using Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher. Tracking hits on that file also tells you how many people have bookmarked your site--and, after two years, I still see at least a few people bookmarking Trygve.Com per hour, which is another fine ego-booster. http://www.favicon.com has just about all you'd want to know about how to make them and why, in case you don't know what I'm talking about.
