Kaolin Fire

Bewildering Stories biography

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Kaolin Fire is a conglomeration of ideas, side projects, and experiments. He’s a sick puppy who apparently likes to do jsps and c in his spare time, and Really enjoys talking in the third person. He runs freebsd and uses vi to write his code/webpages. More than you want to know about him can be learned at erif.org, or, heaven forbid, live journal. He occasionally looks for work.

His (web) development started in 1995 with an “in” at some internet company in the city (San Francisco) while he was going to school, but doesn’t have much from that era left to show. In increasing order of “newness,” he’d love for you to look at: erif.org (his supposed “home page”), imaginaries.org (a writing group he’s “run” for the last many years), poemranker (a side project), or imago, his own web development business. He’s worked out a small niche of doing web development for publications, such as the original NFG, and Unfinished Boston.

His (online) development started in the early 90’s (or late 80’s?) with a 300 baud modem in a box of “commodore 64 junk” at a flea market. That was quickly exchanged for a less-obsolete 1200 baud modem and eventually upgrade to a state-of-the-art 2400 baud modem (and an ibm-compatible 386sx25). He ran his own BBS (running Renegade) which got a significant amount of traffic (for the area). He wrote a few obscure add-ons (Dragon’s Castle, Hospital Lobby) to somewhat less obscure online games (Legend of the Red Dragon and Lunatix).

His (programmatic?) development began in early childhood, typing in line after line of machine code copied from back issues of Compute’s Gazette. At that point, he tinkered with (commodore) basic. Basic became GW Basic became quick basic became pascal and c and assembly, became... these days he mostly does java (though prefers c when he’s not doing web development). Some examples of c code include a nifty fractal auto-explorer, a “groovy” tetris game, and a novel twist on tetris. He, of course, has plenty of other plans which he mostly keeps track of with the nifty hierarchical to-do list site aka skwerms.org.

He was born in late 1977, a happy only-child Sagittarius, and has liked his birthdays less and less since. He does not believe this function to be monotonic, however. He has lived in Washington (state), Wisconsin, Oregon, Illinois, Texas, and California (with a brief bout in Sweden while teaching).

In his “spare” time, besides programming and developing websites, he also likes to paint, write poetry, and write stories.

About the name--this popped up on the Google ads one day, and I just had to share: DIRT EATING. Yeah. Crazy, huh? But it gives a little bit of info on “white dirt,” “kaolin,” “porcelain clay,” “china clay,” “chalk,” “aluminum silicate hydroxide.” Of course, there are better sites, such as wikipedia, for learning about the Kaolin that is not me. And for a second tidbit of name-related oddity, Erif (being Fire backwards, being my former middle and now last name), is also a stock ticker symbol for Erie Family Life Insurance Co. Go figure. On that note — a woman once called me to tell me that Nostradamus mentioned Kaolin in one of his prophecies, in the form of “white milk bubbling out of the ground,” though a quick search doesn’t return anything at this point.