Hi, I'm Ben. I'm an activist and I know stuff about computers. I do system administration stuff around here. My editor of choice is VIM. PHP and MySQL have been providing me endless amounts of pleasure lately. I like open source and GPL in specific (and I understand arguments both for and against). Sometimes I get caught up in spam fighting. I'm a bit frightened by how much I like watching log files with colortail. Want to see a live picture of my qmail+rblsmtpd+ipop3d colortail conf file?
Despite the bad grammer, transmogrification and magniloquence displayed on this page, I get the occasional bit of writing published. Go here for an updated list of published articles. I also edit Oblivion, a youth rights zine I started in 1995.
I consider my politics to be progressive and I'm active in those politics. I focus on drug policy, youth rights and First Amendment issues, but I'm down with a broad spectrum of issues. I know a thing or two about campaign finance laws and I've been treasurer for a number of ballot initiatives. I generally do behind-the-scenes stuff, like coding and accounting and designing paperstuff and anything else that doesn't require face-to-face interaction with other people.
I spend most of my time with Lisa, a marvellously intelligent girl with an knack for making me smile.
I'm a poser and I have the skateboard to prove it. Notice how clean I keep it?
While I don't like the idea of eating animals, the real reason I became vegetarian was because I hate most food and it was a lot easier to say "I'm vegetarian" rather than "I don't like your food." I live on beans, rice, bread, pasta, and other carbohydrates. (I'm a carbohydratarian.) I'm not proud of this; I've been trying to drink those "five servings of vegetable" Naked Juices at least once a week.
If you're interested in reading more personal (way too personal) junk about me, check out my page on oblivion.net. That page has real-live graphics on it. (I've omitted them from this page to impress other geeks -- sans-graphic [pronounced "sans gra-feek"] pages are all the rage these days.)
Some things I'm involved with, in some way or another, that I haven't mentioned above: Tablet newspaper, suing telemarketers who use automatic dialing and announcing devices, Seattle Hempfest, Free Speech Seattle, Criminal Justice Reform Network, and responding to threats from giant media conglomerates.
