What's a Retrophisch?

retrophisch (re-tro-fish), n.
Living organism which is placed in the auditory canal of intelligent life forms. Used as a universal translator.
Disadvantage: Translates to pure Anglo-Saxon English, hence the prefix "retro."

No, seriously, what's a Retrophisch?

A good friend at work was playing around with people's names one day, trying to find decent anagrams. Out of my first name, he came up with "retrophisch".

I happened to mention to my buddy Brian that retrophisch sounded like an off-shoot of the babelfish of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame. From that conversation, he provided the above definition.

So, who are you?

I'm a thirty-something geek in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, a Christ-follower, husband, dad, writer, editor, blogger, Mac nerd, and amateur photographer. I love college football, baseball and hockey.

I worked nearly four years for the directories division of a major multinational telecom company until I was laid off. After a month of unemployment, I briefly worked for a locally-based company helping support the Apple retail stores. I then found myself again in the company of those who have been down-sized. I've been doing tech support of one fashion or another for more than a decade. I'm a die-hard Mac geek, and I love the fact that Mac OS X offers something for both sides of my brain.

I grew up in Baton Rouge from the age of five. I went to LSU, where I met a wonderful, gorgeous woman who found me agreeable enough to marry. We lived in New Orleans for six years, until the move that brought us to Dallas.

Our current stable includes two felines and two canines, all rescued and adopted. Retrophisch version 2.0, aka, the "little phisch", arrived nine weeks early in the late summer of 2003, made phenomenal progress, and is the joy of our lives.

Based on my eating habits, in a former life I was either Mexican or Italian, if I believed in that sort of thing.

What's with the sites?

I got in to writing a weblog, or blogging, in August of 2000, with my initial blog, doing all of the coding, posting, and archiving by hand until May 2002. At that time I switched over to dedicated blogging software in the form of Movable Type, until I discontinued that blog in early October of that same year. That was due in part to the death of Linus, our beloved Pembroke Welsh Corgi and inspiration for that site's name, and to the creation of the anagram that I now proudly bear.

Retrophisch is my blog, where I write about whatever, mostly on the Mac and technology. Thoughts regarding my faith used to be found at Godblog, but since my faith in Christ is the foundation of my soul, well, you'll find all future postings of that nature on Retrophisch. I have retired three other blogs: first, my firearms/Second Amendment blog, Forty Caliber; second, my right-leaning political blog, Ludichris; and lastly, the original blog, digitalpembroke.

So tell me how this all works.

My sites are hosted by Christian Serving. (I'd link to Jim's corporate identity, but he's not currently maintaining a site for it.)

The sites are coded on Macintosh systems with BBEdit, driven by MovableType, with smart punctuation and text formatting provided by John Gruber's SmartyPants and Markdown, respectively.

I'm doing my best to keep the sites conformed to proper web standards, currently XHTML 1.0 Transitional for most pages. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) drive the layout and formatting of the designs. I owe debts of gratitude to Raena, Michael, Lee, Jon, Michael, and Eric for their help with XHTML/CSS issues. You guys rock.

If the site is looking pretty screwed up in your browser, then for crying out loud grab a modern, standards-compliant browser. No one's holding a gun to your head, forcing you to use Netscape Navigator 4 or Internet Explorer.

Commenting

Feel free to comment as often as you like. I ask we be civil in our discussions, and keep the cursing to a minimum. Abusers will have their IPs banned and comments deleted without hesitation. It's my blog, and I reserve the right to censor abusive jerks. Go mouth off on your own blog. I reserve the right to edit comments left for grammatical errors, because, well, it's just something I do.

Privacy Policy

The Retrophisch™ privacy policy is simple and straightfoward:

As far as your individual privacy on these sites go, unless you post a comment, I'll likely never know you've been here. IPs are logged when you comment, as well as by server-side analytical software, though that information is never shared with anyone. If you leave a comment, and fill in an e-mail address, that is solely for my benefit to reply directly to you should it be warranted. Your e-mail address will never be shared with anyone, and e-mail addresses are not displayed publicly.

If you enter a web address in the URL field of the comments section, however, be advised that this is publicly displayed. So if you don't want the world—or at least the readers of any of my blog—knocking on your virtual door, leave this field blank. Limited use of cookies is made for the sole purpose of saving whatever information you fill out in a comments box. Whether a cookie is stored with your information or not is totally dependent on your checking the box marked "Remember info."

If I have missed anything that requires clarification, or if you see something that you feel needs to be addressed from a privacy standpoint, please e-mail me by clicking on my name below.

Anything else?

Retrophisch, Godblog, Forty Caliber, Ludichris, and digitalpembroke are copyrighted © by your gallant host, Christopher Turner, all rights reserved, yadda yadda yadda. Please don't rip off content 'n stuff. Ask before you take.

I am not one of these non-deep-linking curmudgeons that demands you only link to a site's main page. You can link to any page on my sites. Please don't directly link to any images or other non-HTML files; I have limited bandwidth to spare.

If you have read this far and still want to know something, or if you've encountered a bug in any of the sites, please contact me by clicking on my name below and sending me an email. This document will be updated as needed. Thanks for stopping by.