After a two-wek delay due to injury to my right hand, I can finally say welcome to the new and (hopefully final) incarnation of Reality Break! Those of you who have any familiarity with this site know that it has a very checkered history, having first been an attempt at an online magazine in 1995, then various attempts at gaming sites, an attempt at a cooking site, a generic portal for entertainment and most recently, a blog that mostly had content on a few Sherlock Holmes stories.  Despite all of those changes, most of it's life it has been a worthless pile of fetid dung masquerading as a doorstop and was about as interesting as a grey dot on a grey surface to a dog.

For those who are familiar with me, the site's owner, you know that my own history is just as checkered and interesting, so I'll give you one brief moment of hope: I'm not going to write about my personal life beyond my geek and craft interests. No diatribes about my feelings, no in-depth discussions of how sucky my life is or was or may be, and no wallowing in self-pity and despair. Nope, this incarnation of Reality Break will be devoid of all of that and thank goodness for it! The only time such things may come up is as necessary to provide context to a current post.

That said, I do feel it is necessary to provide some brief background for the newcomers who may inadvertandtly stumble across this site trying to get to the Reality Break NPR site (if it even still exists) so here it is, in brief bullet-point format:

• I am 37 years old, having been born in December of 1968.
• I have two daughters: Alexandra (7 years old) and Elisabeth (4 years old), both of whom seem to have inherited the geek gene and both of whom I know I could not live without
• I am hopefully within a week or two of finishing up a divorce that has been going on for the last 14 months
• I am in the middle of filing bankruptcy because of the divorce and because the position I held for 8 years was eliminated in March of this year.
• I was hospitalized for planning suicide in March during an emotional, physical and mental breakdown of epic proportions that has forced me to begin completely redefining my life
• I currently live with my parents because of the above but am hopeful of finding a job soon and moving out within the next few months
• I have always been a geek and always will be, despite anything else that happens in my life!

So why bring that up at all? For two reasons:

1. Because I think there has to be SOME grounding to know where my life is at currently when I talk about my interests and activities and;
2. Because it's important to me to note the bad stuff up front and to emphasize that you will not see much negativity on this site going forward as I have decided that writing and focusing on the negative is not helpful and frankly, it's not who I really am but rather who I allowed circumstances to make me and I want to be myself from now on!

That said, what is the point of this site? To revel in geekness, oddities and diverse interests. I'm a guy who was once Chief Technology Officer at a Fortune 50 company and a serious technophile on one hand and an anime freak, crafter and sewing fanatic on the other. I'm an individual who likes almost all types of music and on any random CD I've burnt you can find Nine Inch Nails followed by Barry Manilow then Sawyer Brown. I'm a fairly knowledgable person on many topics but who never received a High School diploma (got my GED instead) nor did I complete college, preferring self-study and learning through my own drive and hands-on approach. I'm a man who prefers solitude but cannot handle a lack of interaction with others for more than a day.

Some say I'm bi-polar, some say I'm bohemian, some say I'm nuts. I say I'm ECLECTIC.... I'll let you form your own opinion! 

What's more - I know there are other's out there just as geeky, if not geekier than me! And so this site will be for them as well. Over time, I would love to see this site become a community of open-minded geeks rvelling and sharing their geekiness. I would love to add tutorials, reviews, etc that everuone can contribute and get something out of. But for now, I'm just going to start with my own geekiness and we'll see how it grows!

So there you have it! A introduction that is brief but hopefully informative enough to ground the audience going forward (such as that audience may be). From here on in, let the geekfest reign! Explore the site, check out my other sites if you like (see the links at left) and feel free to drop me a line or come to the forums (once I get them open). You never know what you might find!

Until next post: Ciou!