Somehow you've reached my website...and whats even more amazing: you clicked the 'about' link to know more about this folly...and you're still reading!

You may ask yourself: "What the hell is 'shisaa' and whats that ugly thing in the corner?".

I'm glad you asked. The thing in the corner...that is a Shisaa. A guardian demon from the island of Okinawa, Japan.

What you see here is the female version, with her mouth open letting out the bad spirits. The male version has...well...his mouth closed so the good spirits can stay inside. If you ever travel around Okinawa, and you did not spot a Shisaa there...all hope is lost for you. There are about a trizillion there, covering the rooftops, standing at the front door, scaring you in front of a shop, laughing at you at the beach, ...

"But...why is that demon on your website?", you ask me...and what a good question that is!

I don't really know actually. My wife is half-Okinawan and half-Japanese (there is a difference there!), we both love the Japanese way of life and the extra layer of Okinawan culture on top of that...so maybe it is some kind of homage we like to pay to this great island, to our home.

But back to me now, I'm Tim and I am a programmer. Mainly programming for the web, but secretly tasting the offline as well.

I started out as an electrical engineer in some dark and forgotten age, did some artsy-fartsy art collage after that and finally ended up in the sad world of the web. Over the past few years my work varied from design, to interface and slowly creeping towards back-end fiddling.

My weapons of choice in my daily on- and offline hacking are Emacs, Mercurial, Arch Linux Debian, i3, Blender, Gimp, Inkscape, ... kind of open-source oriented you might say.

I program a little bit of PHP (yeah, I know, It's terrible), a load of Python (yeah!) and from time to time enter the schemy hens nest of the CHICKEN. Over the past few years I've been telling people I know a lot about Drupal (hence why I'm still on the PHP bandwagon) and I've been developing a few modules for this "framework" as well. Out of the love for bottom-up development (and the hatred towards over bloated frameworks, like the one mentioned a few words back) my Python work usually revolves around Flask and its foundations or around statically creating pages with Nikola.

Besides spending many hours a day staring at computer screens, I have a deep interest for Japanese culture. I also sometimes delude myself into thinking I can shoot pictures and to add up to these illusions I manage to make real 3D artists weep at the abominations that I force Blender to spit out.

My online presence:

• Twitter: @timusan
• Ohloh: https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/timusan

There, now go read some other part of this site.