My name is A. J. Mako. Like the sign says, I’m a writer, programmer, and web developer. This is my personal website, which means this is a little piece of the Internet that I can be too busy to update regularly.
Writer
Writing is probably my number one passion. I could write twenty hours a day if I didn’t need sleep every once in a while. Unfortunately, I can’t write twenty hours a day, which means I have to write when I can. That means I rarely get the chance to fully develop any ideas I get, which means I have started a heck of a lot of writing projects. I haven’t finished very many.
When I’m writing, I usually use OpenOffice and Scrivener. I find ProWritingAid very helpful as well.
Programmer
I started programming computers way back. The first programming I ever did was in BASIC on a friend’s VIC-20. I tried to program a virtual tour of the solar system but ran out of space on the storage cassette. Then I got into the Navy and found myself using a computer every day. The one I used was a Zenith Z-286 running DOS. The first programming I did on that thing was building spreadsheets in SuperCalc and writing mail-merge documents in WordStar. Then I moved to dBase III and FoxBASE+. The first computer I ever owned was an IBM PS/1 (model 2133-53, 486SX25, with 4 MB of RAM and a 129 MB hard drive with MS-DOS 6.0 and Windows 3.1 installed).
I have done programming in Visual Basic, C++, Java, PHP, ColdFusion, ASP, Javascript and several BBS systems (Wildcat!, Spitfire, Excalibur and KBBS). Despite all this experience, I still had to take “Introduction to Programming and Logic” in college.
Web Design
I started doing web design in the summer of 1995. I taught myself HTML in two hours, and was almost a charter member of the HTML Writer’s Guild (they wanted money). I have designed hundreds of websites over the years, some of which or still in operation. I prefer to apply the KISS design principle.
Themes
The original design of this website was my own creation, which I called “Plan 9.” I included a number of “eye-candy” images from The Day The Earth Stood Still and a BBC production of R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) and some other sci-fi shows and movies. Plan 9 was later converted into a WordPress theme. The next design was called “Plan 9 2019.” It’s was a child theme of the WordPress “Twenty Fifteen” theme. The current theme is called “Plan 9 (2021).” It is a child theme of the Blogstream theme by Alx.
I’m rather fond of science fiction, robots and old movies. The sidebar includes a random poster from one of my favorite movies. You find frequent references to old television shows, old movies, science fiction in general, as well as interactive fiction throughout this site.
