Hi there. My name is Crockett.

Thanks @neilstrauss for turning me on to this site.

This is my first time posting, so here is a little info about who I am and stuff I think about. I look forward to reading about who you are and what stuff you think about.

I live in Monterey County, CA- specifically a little town named Salinas that you may have heard heard of from a Janis Joplin song or Steinbeck book.

Like any other place, we have good stuff and bad stuff. A surprisingly serious gang problem is one lesser-known attribute, and we're working on that. What does your town do with it's $5.5MM federal funding for gang and violence prevention? Part of what ours did was buy a $1.5MM automatic gunshot detection system. You can't make this stuff up. Maybe someday humans will discover another way to detect gunshots, but until then.... sigh.

Did I mention the arts? Down the road in Carmel, there are some amazing artists, including one of my favorites, Scott Jacobs of The Pegasus Collection. I call Scott the Gangster of Watercolor in a way similar to how some call Steve Miller the gangster of love. His palette knife work is awesome, too.

This work moves me more than most.

I'm married to a pretty awesome (pretty and awesome) physician named Analisa. She spends a lot of her time welcoming babies into the world at odd hours, and sometimes helping moms survive if there are surprises beforehand or afterwards.

My favorite 5 year old boy in the world is my son Asher. Sometimes I call him Smasher, especially when he's crushing it at the skatepark. Here's a picture of him contemplating the full-pipe in Santa Cruz:

Seriously, though- just between us... I took 7 months and twice as many bruises and scrapes getting to where I could just possibly look cool for him on a skateboard, and he has already surpassed me. It was worth it though for one "whoa dad that was cool."

Want to see ONE MILLION pictures of Asher? (you know how parents do that??) I can provide them... for real.

Did I mention Salinas is home of creepy lettuce balls man?

Here you can resolve your WTF.

In other news, one time, this happened when I pet a llama.

More about me- I've been online since before graphical browsers, and I love solving problems related to internet applications. Over the years I have navigated the full stack, from client/server-side scripting to database normalization and page/object caching, touching everything in-between.

While I was at Duke University, I was supposed to be studying soil, dirt, concrete, steel, and waste management, collectively known as Civil and Environmental Engineering. But here's the thing: I discovered this crazy-new experimental computer thing at the time. It was similar to gopher and ftp, but assets were embedded inside a page, analogous to those in a printed book. These things were called "web pages," and they combined to make up the "world wide web." And so it came to happen that I spent most of my time experimenting with the awesome possibilities for this new interactive media.

I mean, how could I not? As if hyperlinking content weren't enough of a game changer in and of itself, rotating and randomizing on-page content, plus incorporating conditional logic into "pages" was the coolest thing to I had come across since "choose your own adventure" books in elementary school!

Long story short, I did some technology consulting before managing to graduate (still in Civil Engineering) with the help of some very patient & kind professors and supportive peers. I even made the dean's list the semester before I JavaScript (back then called LiveScript) support was introduced into web browsers.

I moved out to CA, got a job working for the national admin office of a multi-national law firm (think two-letter domain name) before being lured away to a dot-com boomer. Then after that, I started my own business.

So that's a little about me. Now tell me about you? Read any good books lately? Like I wondered earlier, who are you and what stuff do you think about?

As they say on the construction signs in South Lake Tahoe:

--Crockett