BeMused

Everything you wanted to know about Shad…
…but were afraid to ask…

So now I know you’re asking yourself…who, or what is a Shad? Well, Webster’s defines a Shad as the following:

Any of several food fishes of the genus Alosa, especially the North American species A. sapidissima, related to the herrings but atypical in swimming up streams from marine waters to spawn.

Now, I know that shad are used primarily as bait. Great, eh? Imagine a kid growing up, discovering his name is that of a fish. One of the cruelest jokes I think my father ever played on me was bringing home a can of smoked shad. “Be good son, or this is what happens to you!!”

No wonder people think I’m weird. It’s my fathers fault.

So anyhow, about this Shad: He’s a wanna-be geek, bald headed, Harley riding, connoisseur of flannels, who loves messing with computers, web pages, guitars, and his Harley. Oh, and he’s used mostly for bait.

I’m a 30-something (at least for a few more months!) guy who spent most of that time in Arizona. I love Arizona, especially Northern Arizona. I spent a lot of time in Flagstaff, and I hope to eventually make it back to that neck of the woods. I was actually born in Tucson, so I guess I’m a native. I’ve also spent time in Oregon, and in Texas, just north of Houston. Oregon I loved. We were in a suburb of Portland, and it was gorgeous. Houston on the other hand, I hated. It just stunk.

Currently, we live in Virginia, about a 45 minute drive from DC. Place called Sterling, and I have to admit, it’s pretty here. We truly get seasons, something that is rare in Arizona (specifically southern Arizona. There you have 2 seasons: hot and hotter). The spring here is nice, if your allergies aren’t too bad, and the fall is simply gorgeous. I uprooted my family from AZ to move out here for job reasons. I worked for AOL (Say what you will but it’s a great place to work) and moving out here has been a nice change of pace.

On the home front: I guess I’m your typical suburbanite…I’m married, have two kids, one dog, one cat, live in the ‘burbs. Oh God, I’m my parents!

Everything you wanted to know about Shad’s Pad…
Shad’s Pad was started as a personal project, and I started using it as an online journal way before the blogging fad caught on. It started with me manually updating each page, adding a new table, table row, table data cell, all that wonderful crap. Eventually I realized that there were easier ways to go about posting, and I downloaded and installed Greymatter. After it getting hacked a couple of times, and taking down my site (which just irritated my brother and his buddy to no end: they hosted my site for me, and quite frankly, I’m surprised they put up with me as long as they did), I switched over to pMachine. After several long months of learning its intricacies, the development stopped, so I switched over to WordPress, which is where I am now. I highly recommend anyone who wants to try blogging software start with WordPress. It’s quite easy, free and full of features.

I tend to ramble about a lot of nothing here – Macs and Windows machines, photography, music, various flavors of CMSs, my Harley… just whatever catches my fancy I guess!

Guess that’s about it for now. Hope you enjoy your stay!