In a Nutshell

Me

A Personal Biography

I came into this world on December 2 just outside of my home town West Chester, PA. So far most of my life has been occupied by the pursuit of an expensive piece of paper called a college degree (told to be the key to a successful future) from Penn State University. During those years I had the bright idea to fill what little time I had left with work — namely working full-time at Circuit City and doing free-lance Web development on the side. Basically I spent the early years of my life learning how to go without sleep, which I will point out is much more useful then anything they'll teach you in college.

I get the diploma, smile for the pictures, and join the workforce. I managed to get lucky and get a job as a software engineer for Lockheed Martin. At first I was sent down to Maryland for six months. After suffering down there I was sent over to Japan for five months, which I must point out was an amazing time and something I'd love to do again. Fortunantly once I got back to the states I managed to get myself transfered back to Pennsylvania, far away from the terrible drivers of Maryland. It seems like I'm in PA to stay, which is just fine by me.

Contrary to first impressions I was not always into computers; earlier in my life I aspired to become an artist. No, really! As luck would have it just when I was starting to become proficient with a sketch-pad I discovered the TI-82 programmable calculator. By the end of the first math class I had already programmed it to draw Mickey Mouse on the screen (Hey, its better then “Hello World!”).

In high school I got out of software development in favor of Web development, swearing never to get a boring 9-5 job writing code in a cubicle. I'd instead be a work-from-home Web developer. Well, we all know that bubble burst (probably at the same time your stocks plummeted around the year 2000). I now find myself back in software development, which fortunately isn't as bad as I thought it would be. Can you taste the irony?

Geek at heart, I often find myself reading (Ender's Game, Snow Crash, Pastwatch, Sandman), selling my soul to MMORPGs (World of Warcraft), playing classic RPGs (Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy), watching anime (Lain, Kenshin, Cowboy Bebop, Full Metal Alchemist, Bleach), or lounging on the couch enjoying some good TV (Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Daily Show). I've also started spending my free time getting back into art, mainly of the digital variety. Got a lot of catching up to do.

Colophon

Warning: technical mumbo-jumbo within.

A Colophon is: "A notation placed in the end of a book that gives information about its production."

As you should have gathered by this point, Forgotten Expanse is the personal site of Curtis Herbert (thats me!). Honestly, it doesn't have much of a point. Its just a little corner of the internet that I can claim ownership of and do whatever I want with. Usually that involves writing about something I find interesting, posting some photos I've taken, or images that I've made in my quest to get back into art.

This site has been around since 2000 — back in the days when web logs weren't trendy yet, weren't called blogs, and everyone and their mother didn't have one. Since then its gone through one database wipe, six redesigns, and three complete rewrites in two languages.

Forgotten Expanse is currently powered by my own framework written in PHP because, well, I just didn't want to use anything like Wordpress. Where's the fun in that? Served using only the finest ingredients (XHTML 1.1 and CSS), this site plays well with all browsers (even that pesky IE). The site is built almost entirely on Mac, using the wonderful text-editor skEdit for hand-coded goodness.

If you have any questions or comments, please, feel free to contact me.

Thanks for visiting.