by Michael Rawdon, yr hmbl jrnlr

I grew up in the the Boston area. However, I've lived all over the country: I went to college in New Orleans, Louisiana (Tulane), graduate school at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, lived in Madison for another five years thereafter, and finally moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in California in 1999. I still feel like a Midwesterner in many ways, too.

I have a degree in computer science, and I work for Apple Computer as a developer on their Xcode development product for Mac OS X. Apple's faults are sometimes heavily publicized, but it's a wonderful place to work with a lovely campus and terrific benefits (actual and fringe). As a computer user I've been a Macintosh partisan for years, so I'm happy to no longer be working in the Windows world.

I have a wide variety of hobbies, and not enough time to pursue them all. I avidly read science fiction and other books and also collect comic books. I enjoy going to baseball games and going to see old movies at the Stanford Theatre. I watch some television (favorite current show: Smallville), play ultimate frisbee, play games with my friends, and work out regularly. I sometimes go hiking and I love the ocean. I also have a fairly active social life.

I was born in 1969, which makes me thirty-something. I'm single, but have been involved with a woman named Debbi since 2001. We went to high school together, but didn't really know each other until we met out here.

I have two cats, Newton and Jefferson, who have been with me since 1994. They're two of the friendliest felines you're ever likely to meet, and I love them to death.

I like the weather in California well enough, but find it very bizarre that it doesn't snow.

If you're interested, I have a lengthier, more detailed biography, as well as an entry with a few more random facts about me.

I first discovered on-line journals when I found C.J. Silverio's, in particular her Clarion writer's workshop entries. I thought it was pretty neat, and thought I'd give it a try myself - to spice up my otherwise somewhat stagnant Web page - so a month or so later, I did.

It's not quite as easy as it looks. Designing a "look" for a journal can be tricky, to make it suitably navigable and readable. Plus, you have to decide how much you want to write about other people, and what they will think of that. (Some journallers use pseudonyms for all the people in their journal.) Also, how much I was willing to talk about work, especially when things weren't going well. Not to mention how much of my own soul - my inner feelings, worries, angsts, joys, things I don't generally give voice to in groups - I wanted to bare to my mysterious readership.

It can be a tough road to walk sometimes.

It's rewarding, though. It makes me think about things in my life, and things I do during the day. Sometimes it makes me think how I can make my writing livelier and more engaging (I often feel like my writing comes across as somewhat flat), and I've played around with different technologies to introduce graphics and such into the journal.

I continue to keep the journal because it keeps me engaged, and it feels useful to me overall. I don't often write every day anymore, and sometimes it is a responsibility I don't feel like tackling just at that particular moment, but overall I keep up with it. Getting feedback from my readership from time to time is also nice; I've learned some interesting and useful things from people over the last several years. And I've met quite a few nice people who also keep on-line journals. Heck, C.J. and I have become good friends since I moved to California.

But ultimately I keep writing because it's personally rewarding. Which I think is what a journal should be, whether it's on-line or not.