Last Updated: 1st of March, 2021 [1 Day after Buddhist Holiday]
In simple word, I am a geek, blue-collar in "White-Collar" – complete with a Computer Science degree, two decades of overexposure to the Internet, Marketing, Finance, and Investment experience – as well as social graces that allow me to mediate between geeks and “regular” folk.
I have pretty much done it all where it comes to the Internet world, having been immersed in B2C, B2B and IP-related stuff at some enterprises several years ago.
During that time, I have spent my time either acting as an application specialist, system administrator and interfacing with Marketing or as a sales manager and interfacing with Engineering, dealing with long, big, extremely convoluted projects that span companies, national borders and yearly budgets, and often the sort of thing that takes years to show a profit (but when it does, it is big).
I will not bother you with my CV. I honestly can not be bothered with it myself, but I guess some sort of background information is in order here…
Suffice it to say that it has long stopped being about technology, but the current joke is that on the org chart I am heading a big box called… “Stuff”.
What? When? Where? Why? and How?
By some demand (from friends, co-worker, and families, here is a little chart of what I did, where I did it and proof those places outlived my presence there, without giving away too much:
Click Graphic to view Details (No changes since October 2021)
I do a lot of analysis, planning and budgeting stuff, usually on the bleeding edge of things – which, in an internet oriented organisation, means three-year-long projects that will use some sort of technology that is not even around yet, so there is a lot of paperwork involved while vendors and partners hammer out the details with us. It adds up to a lot of documents, prototypes, tests, and umpteen versions of web pages, promotional material, use case docs, project plans and network diagrams or budget spreadsheets (the kind that will not even fit into a 27” screen (iMac) – believe me, I did try!
I also have a knack for getting involved in all the latest bleeding edge tech, mostly because I have been doing new product development for so long that if something is not working or needs clarification, it usually finds its way to my desk on its own (I honestly do not go looking for any of it, and it can get unnerving at times). And it is long stopped being “just” technical – if any issue has impact on the business model of a service, it crosses my desk as well.
And I get involved daily on a lot of convoluted discussions concerning the intersection between technology and business models in the internet frontier. That should give you an idea of how wild it can get, and how leery I am of hype and fantastic new business models (especially the kind with revenue projections that only go up).
It is damned hard, damned stressful, and currently requires a degree of self-motivation that most people can not even begin to guess at, since I often find myself at odds with several conflicting business/technical/policy issues at a time, and no way out but disentangling them bit by bit. Literally.
Obviously, the people who work around me are a great help (and I count myself lucky in that regard).
Why The Mac? (and iPhone)
There is a whole FAQ on the site, but the gist of it is that I needed something more (at least something more immediately rewarding), and since I can not ever really tune out from work, I did the next best thing: a few years back I bought an iMac and went back to basics: powerful, flexible computers that do not crash and actually let me do what I want to do with my dwindling free time, like managing my CD collections, tallying my books and sorting my photo and video albums.
The Mac also lets me indulge in coding, keep track of the multitude of projects I’m always involved in, and, of course, maintain this site.
It started out as a sort of experiment, and now I find it to be the most productive environment I ever used.
But let’s not go there.
Contact Information
I can be reached as polthorn at gmail dot com (heavily Spam filtered, use with caution, as I will ignore “ALL” messages sent to spam box), as well as a couple of other addresses – but this is the best way to reach me. I am also on
