User Profile

[You can find me on Twitter here.]

"Des" has no relation to my real name. It is short for the name of a character in a series of (really bad) short stories I wrote in elementary school. My real name is Josh -- whether you refer to me as "Josh" or "Des" is entirely up to you.

I am me. I don't really know what that means, but then, who does? How this vague bundle of sensory perceptions and memories can be a coherent individual is beyond me, but there you have it.

Philosophy: I think I am agnostic, perhaps with Buddhist leanings, which means I have a rather annoying tendency to loudly insist I don't know anything about the Universe. ;)

Sexuality: I think I am vaguely bisexual, but I try to avoid labels as my sexuality seems to be a fluid thing. For a while, I was mostly interested in girls; now I'm leaning toward boys. It has never been strictly one or the other.

Some would say that means I can "change" to be gay or straight. But I see no value in rejecting part of who I am. I rather like being able to look myself--all of myself--in the mirror in the morning.

Furry: I draw strong parallels between my personality and the personality of a stereotypical cat. (Siamese, if you must know.) Some say that makes me a furry. I suppose in some ways I am, but in other ways I'm not. Furry for me is more of a side hobby than a lifestyle.

Vocation: I'm a software developer, recently graduated from Cal Poly, with a strong preference for Open Source software. I enjoy thinking about programming languages (compilers, virtual machines and the like), and concurrency, though at times I find it a bit hard to wrap my brain around those topics. I'm also frustrated with the facilities we currently have for organizing information (such as filesystems and relational databases). Sadly, I don't yet have a solution to my frustration.

Sometimes I wish I had been a Linguistics major, or a Psych major. But more often than not, I'm happy with my chosen profession.

Things that make me happy (in no particular order):

• People, in general
• Honesty
• Movies and books that make you think
• People that make you think
• Long, deep and meaningful conversations, even if they're not easy
• Clouds, rain, thunder
• Animals that don't stink and aren't poisonous
• Cats (over and above animals in general)
• Stuff that is funny
• Computers, when they work right
• Cool, nifty programs (if I'm the one that wrote them ;P)

Things that piss me off (in no particular order):

• People, in general
• Homophobes
• People who don't keep an open mind when it comes to religion
• George Dubya Bush (He's finally out of the picture.)
• People who value security over freedom
• Offtopic LJ comments
• Punctuation, spelling and capitalization mistakes
• The English language (even though I am a native speaker)
• The RIAA
• SCO, Microsoft, and other such companies
• People who don't move over on the freeway
• Java (the language, not the bean)

Decode my furcode:
FFD1 A--> C>+ D- H+ M- P R+++ T W Z- Sm- RLCT a cl++++ d e++ f++ h iwf+++ j+ p->+ sm+

In the event of an emergency that directly involves me, please see this post (or find someone on my friends list who can).

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