Jonathan Love

I admit, I’m stealing a little lot from the style of Jeff Atwood’s rather spectacular Coding Horror blog, as I’m always at a loss as to what to put in a first post. Anyway, without further ado:

Who are you?

My name is Jonathan Love. I live in the post-earthquake city of Christchurch, NZ, in a rather tiny room in a student flat. However, I am not a student – I work as a systems administrator and copywriter for an Internet Marketing company. Because, y’know, those jobs are totally related.

I have been a ‘computer whiz’ since I first managed to use a computer which, thanks to my dad, was really rather early on. My first computer was a PII with 64Mb of RAM in the 90s, and my sister and I would use both Windows 95 and DOS6 to play a multitude of games (Jazz Jackrabbit, anyone?). I was ‘lucky’ in that I was brought up in the last days where people still lived in the command prompt, so I learned how to use a computer ‘properly’. Hell, the thing even had a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive!

I really began learning to program just before the turn of the century. I encountered Quickbasic 4.5 and started learning how to do cool stuff with that. From there I quickly moved onto Visual Basic 5 (haha oh the fun), then to Pascal, then to Visual Basic .NET (it took a long time for me to convince my friend to move from VB6.0 to .NET… now he won’t code in anything else), Python, Assembler, C, C++, Python… etcetera. I also started learning about operating systems that were not Windows. In fact, my first use of not-Windows was a Red Hat 9 install I got from a friend in 2005.

Wait, this blog is about more than computers, right?

Indeed! In fact, the subtitle of this blog is “Theatre, servers, code and marketing”!

First, a bit of background: through High School I was an introverted nerd. I had little social development and… yeah. People. I didn’t really like hanging out with them. Anyway, I joined the crew club and made (if I say so myself) a damned good techie. I liked the theatre, I admit! However, I always preferred being backstage, making sure things ticked along, and fixing things when they (often) broke.

Anyway, senior year rolled around and my school was putting on their first real show in a couple of years. What’s more, it was a musical, not the boring fluff we’d staged previously. Being the impressionable youth that I was (okay, still am) I had been influenced by films like High School Musical (the shame. But not really – it’s a film with a good message), so I told myself “oh screw it all. Step out of my comfort zone. I’m gonna audition for this thing”.

I almost crapped myself in the audition, and my voice was no doubt flaky and wavy as hell. But I got a callback. Then I got asked to try for a specific role. And, lo’ and behold, I became a supporting lead!

Immediately after that show was over, one of the local amateur theatre groups put out the notice that they were staging the New Zealand Premiere of Miss Saigon. So I auditioned for that. Again, against odds, I made the chorus!

I guess I rather caught the bug. Since Miss Saigon I have since been involved with yet another four musicals and various dramatic performances, and I don’t expect to stop just yet. I enjoy theatre, I enjoy teching for theatre, and I enjoy performing in theatre (but, haha, don’t ask me whether I enjoy being on production teams. No. Just no.) So from time to time I will post tips here about theatre tech, give the odd endorsement for local productions (sorry out-of-town/overseas readers) and other general stuff

So what else is this blog about?

It’s a blog. So, really, whatever the hell comes into my head. However, I hate blogs which are just mindless drivel about a person’s mundane life (oh crap. What the hell is this post then?). I’d rather this blog served a useful purpose and told you awesome stuff. However, there’s a few topics I think I’ll be addressing more regularly than others:

• Code – If it isn’t already obvious, I program. I enjoy programming. Admittedly I don’t get nearly as much done as I’d like. However, for those eureka moments or things that I think are really nifty, I’ll blog about them
• Theatre - …I think the previous section explains this topic
• Servers - Okay, so I work as a sysadmin, and I really hate it when I know someone else has solved the problem I’m struggling with, but probably hasn’t blogged about it. So whenever I’ve just done something really difficult, or really cool, or I’ve been introduced to an awesome technology, I’ll try to blog or write a tutorial about it here. You can thank me later.
• Marketing - Specifically Internet Marketing. Okay, so I work for an Internet Marketing company and, despite what you might think, Internet Marketing actually isn’t all the scum of the Internet, which is what I originally thought. I have since learned that most major marketers actually promote ethical marketing of various products that don’t fill the Internet with wasted space. I’ve also learned they’ve made a lot of money, and since money is always attractive, I’ve rather caught the IM bug. So while I aim to work on my various IM projects, I will from time to time make a post about my successes, failures, and general progress here. Hopefully.
• Reviews - Okay, so this isn’t in the title, but there’s many occasions where I’ve sat down somewhere and eaten food, or watched something, or listened to something, where I’ve gone “wow, I’d really like to praise this” or “wow, this is really rather terrible“. So, be warned, I might give the odd review of stuff, where ‘stuff’ here = ‘anything’.

Why did you start a blog?

To feed my insatiable need to stroke my ego. Okay that’s not entirely true. I’m not going to lie: every time I’ve started a blog previously, I’ve failed at keeping it updated. I rather suspect this one will fall the same way, though I hope not. However my main motivation for starting a blog was actually because of my earlier point about Servers – I hate it when I know someone has done something I’m struggling with, and not told people how they fixed the problem. So I wanted a place where I could post my strokes of genius, my eureka moments, or just general stuff I think could actually be useful to someone else.

It will also hopefully help me track my progress as a programmer/sysadmin/marketer/person so I can look back in five/ten years and go ‘haha wow, I was really ignorant then. Glad I’m not that ignorant now’. Then do exactly the same thing in another ten years.

This blog still looks pretty basic

I’m still working on this site, m’kay. I swear by the time actual readers begin to start reading my site, it’ll look a bit better.

So now what?

Well, I think that pretty much concludes my first post. Um, other fluff: you can call me Jonny. Or Jono.  Or J. If I’ll respond to it, then it’s okay to call me that.

You can also contact me at me@jonolove.com.

Anything cool you can leave me with?

Um, yeah, sure. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Freddie Wong. He does visual effects. And his Youtube channels are pretty freaking awesome. And funny.