This is my lame homepage. Feel free to e-mail me with compliments, flames, insults, whatever! I'll read them all, but won't necessarily grace them with a reply.
My name is David McIntyre. My online nickname is Plugh. Several people have asked from whence came my alias. All I can say is, follow the link and find out for yourself. :) I was born in San Francisco, California, right near the Haight-Ashbury district in 1971. I lived there for 8 joyous years until my parents decided to move the family to Mobile, Alabama. Well, to make a VERY long story short, I spent 17 grueling years dealing with the heat, the humidity, and Southern Hospitality.
I did, however, make a few close friends while I was there, who are very dear to my heart. They have been the reason for more than a few high phone bills.
In June of 1996, a dream of mine came true, and an opportunity made itself available to move back to California.
I currently own a home in Loma Mar, California.
I have a rather diverse range of interests, and things are constantly changing. So this area will probably be under continual modification. Recently, my musical tastes have undergone a change toward Electronica. Especially hard techno. Pink Floyd is by far my favorite band. I cannot even rank that concert experience with any other. I am also a fan of Led Zepplin, The Doors, and Jethro Tull (as far as my Classic Rock tastes go). My "Modern Rock" tastes branch pretty far and wide into Ambient techno and dark music such as industrial and gothic. Something I think is really cool is radio stations that put live audio feeds on the net. I highly suggest listening to KFJC or KZSU, local college stations and SomaFM. Their format is rather eclectic, so a quick perusal of their program schedules may be in order.
I also like movies. The stranger, the better. I have always liked David Lynch, and Quentin Tarantino is one of the finest directors of surreal movies of late. I also love bad horror movies. The worse they are, and the less seriously they take themselves, the better! But a good surreal horror movie, like the work of John Carpenter is just fine by me.
Books are also good. Some of my favorite authors are Neil Stephenson, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Robert Heinlein, and Douglas Adams. Recent books have been the Landover and Shannara series by Terry Brooks and the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan.
Then, there is the wide world of computers and the Internet. I am proud to have been a netizen for over 20 years, and I have seen a LOT of changes in this time. All this graphics stuff and formatted text wasn't even available when I started. HTML was in planning stages, and it took a dedicated hacker to get a PC on the 'net. The only reason why anyone would want to do that was to connect to a UNIX machine that would do all the dirty work.
I found it much easier to load Linux on my PC and run from there. All the best apps were developed under X-Windows and curses anyway. Now-a-days, anyone with a chunk of change and half a brain can get on the net and spew forth their consciousness. Is this a good or a bad thing? I guess both. The final outcome remains to be seen. Anyway, I guess that's it for my social commentary. Now on to my history in computers.
My first, in 1984, was an Atari 400 with 4k of RAM (who needed more?!?). I eventually got a cassette drive for it and I was cruisin' in style! Eventually, I upgraded to the 130XE, got a couple of floppy drives and upgraded the RAM to 576K. This was a kick-ass system for its day. The biggest Atari in Mobile. I just HAD to put up a BBS, as it was THE thing to do those days. Well, a 15-year-old with his own phone line and a computer is a dangerous thing. I ended up taking down the BBS over financial concerns.
Then, in 1989, I saved up enough to get my first PC. An 8088-10 with 2 floppy drives and monochrome monitor. Several upgrades later, this became a 386SX-16 with 4meg of RAM and a 32meg hard drive which sits on my brother's desk to this day, with the same keyboard and case as the original.
I really have developed a dislike for Microsoft and their bullying tactics, and I boycott them wherever possible.
I'm running 3 Macs, a Windows laptop, and a Sun and a Linux server. My Internet presence is almost exclusively restricted to EFNet IRC, where I hang out as Plugh. On IRC, I could be in any channel, no channel, or completely offline at any given time. I got my start on IRC 17 years ago, when I hung around in the "hacker" channels. I learned a lot, taught a lot of people, made a whole lot of information available, and got into some trouble for it. So, I don't hack anymore. But I do keep in touch with my old friends, several of whom are still around from those early days, and several who came in along the way.
I've worked throughout the Bay Area in the online communities space, biotech, email delivery, e-commerce, and education.
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