My name is Kevin Rogers. I am solely responsible for what you see and read here. I have been involved with computers, mostly as a programmer, since I left the idyllic campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara some 18 years ago. I did not study computers, instead taking advantage of UCSB´s strength as a place to learn about social and chemical interactions. My only regret was graduating a quarter too late to get my diploma signed by a convicted felon, c´est la vie.

I am a father of two, with an 10 year old son and daughter of 12. I love being a dad. I was married, but did not love that so much. Now I am in a long term relationship. I work as a C++ programmer in the backwaters of large multinational conglomerate, writing windows software that helps people interact with their motion control devices. I have a small business that is still a "learning experience". In the time before, I programmed IBM mainframes and Unix (internet) and Windows (intranet) servers. I sometimes miss those not so distant days of dot com euphoria. Don´t we all.

A life lived for a while in internet years lead me to an appreciation of poetry. Once you get used to reading it, the quick shots of emotion and perspective can be quite desirable. Here is one I wrote during my sleepless year. It is called Office View - Morning:

First, I would like to make clear this is a creative writing project, not the cornerstone of the coming rev01u_tion.

I find my thinking improves with the use of a keyboard. The act of typing actually seems to extend my ability to come up with ideas. That makes me happy. Having an (imagined?) audience gives me motivation. Is not the web great? Well, I think it is. I also have this problem of constrained time and a deliberate approach to life. I cannot talk to my friends as much as I wish, so this is an alternative approach to badgering them over a beer. The format of the site is my own creation. I tried to make it as minimal as possible. Hope it works. If you read this, thanks, in absentia.

My domain is kafekevin.com. By the time I got around to getting my own domain, pretty much every word in the English language was taken. I guess there are businesses (scalpers?) that buy up the domain names in mass, and then put the squeeze on those who might actually want to use one. That left me to either make up a word or string words together.

Following the latter approach, my domain is a concatenation of the words café + kevin. The café gives it a sense of place, the kevin makes it easy to remember. Being in a perpetual mid-life crisis, of course, I could not stop there. It needed some indication that it was also "hip" to the geek culture of the net. That is were the odd spelling, café -> kafe, comes in. It is not quite leet speak, but at least it is a deliberate misspelling. Besides, I like the matching k´s.

I love my one eyed cat Jackson.
I hate McDonalds restaurants.

I love beating my brother at whatever game we are playing.
I hate any food that is not at least two levels of processing removed from nature.

I love playing hide and seek.
I hate the squirt bottle.