Biography

First off, I’m an Information Architect for a living. Owing mainly to that, I’ve got a real love-hate relationship with the more cannonical organizational schemes for websites. Especially blogs. Now, most of the time I live in the -love- side of the street, but all these blogs, microblogs, whatevers, et cetera are playgrounds and I kind of treat them as such. So hopefully you’re not the kind of dork who gets all self-righteous if the “About” page is off-topic. And if you are, well, I love you but get over it.

So when I grabbed this blog address a few years ago, here’s what was going on: I had used wordpress as a stand-alone on a number of sites, including my own, way too personal blog site. Any veteran WP users can attest to the spam/hijack vulnerabilities that such installations represented. After a couple of years of it, I was fed up. I got tired of the constant vigilance involved with maintaining WP on my server, so I was drawn to this easier way.  I found a kickass subdomain on WP, traded in my domain addiction for simplicity, and washed my hands of the hassle.  I’ve been let known that I “should” post a lorem ipsum generator on this site, but there are a bundle of good ones out there already. If that’s what you’re looking for, follow this link.

Second off, I do relatively serious stuff a lot of the time (read: work). Which makes me a frustrated artist. Yeah yeah, it’s a stereotype, but it reflects reality. It’s not to say my job’s not creative, because it sure can be and often is. But I went to school not once, but twice, for fine arts. BFA 1994 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (no, I wasn’t pals with David Sedaris, though we shared writing workshop teacher Jim McManus) and MFA 1997 from the University of Oregon. Both degrees were, more or less, in painting. I taught painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design from 1997-2001. I showed and sold paintings pretty intensely. Painting was my life until my second son was born, which was only 8 years ago. So to end up practicing something as straight-laced as IA for a career means there’s a flipside that needs some serious outlet time. No single dumb blog’s got the facets to be the everything, but this is sometimes a good start.

Some of the rest, in no particular order:

I also spend cycles analyzing anatomies and classifying various types of tweets and trying to figure out the inflection of that galaxy.
I’m genuinely into the structures, movements, & relationship potential of social networking.
I paint when I can, I make things like furniture and dinner and all that jazz.
If you’ve ever gone to a Rite Aid to buy pencils and been shocked to find one in your pack of 10 replaced with a counterfeit pencil made entirely of wood, lacking lead or eraser, I may well be the responsible party.
In 1998, I opened an online confessional called confess-it.com, and received/collected thousands of mostly boring submissions – and a handful of the most disturbing confessions I’ve ever read. Confess-it.com is online today, but updated and changed and operated by New York State Council of the Arts.
I’m also responsible for a modest number of photos on flickr, and you can check them out but I’m not making any quality claims.
I’m the single father of three totally kickass kids who challenge me to grow more than I’m comfortable with nearly every day.

If you want to get in touch with me, use the contact/comments thingy on this site. I get stuff, and I write back. Follow me on twitter too if you don’t already. Find me there at www.twitter.com/texburgher and follow. And be good. Until then,

Geoff