Everything You Wanted To Know About Rob Malda And Less...

Rob Malda
slashdot.org

Well, this is the portion of my web page where I am forced by both state federal laws to tell you assorted boring tidbits of information about my personal life. Since in my case, fact really isn't stranger then fiction, I'm just going to try make a few things up.

I was born in the great city of Holland Michigan where I was raised by Wolves (named Nancy and Bob). I was permantly warped by attending Holland Christian High School, and I now continue destroying my brain at Holland's other great educational institution- Hope College [ http://www.hope.edu/ ]. I am a CompSci major for many important reasons including:

A heart felt desire to gain a deeper understanding into something which will play an important part in our future
Money
An uncontrolable interest in figuring out things like IRQ's, Jumper settings infitite loops and Memory Addresses
An inner calling to play with Philips screwdrivers and high voltage
Money
A strong need to somehow construct a woman like those kids in Weird Science
Money

Without getting boring and longwinded, I'll just briefly say that I enjoy listening to a varied selection of music including classic rock (The Who, Pink Floyd, Led Zepellin, the Beatles) and a lot of movie soundtracks. I'm especially fond of Disney soundtracks (Lion King, Aladdin, the Little Mermaid etc). I am the only person on earth who will buy a Disney soundtrack before the release of the movie so I can sing along on opening night. My bruises still haven't healed from Aladdin. If you haven't bought the Hunchback of Notre Dame soundtrack, you're missing out.

As colorful as music may be, my first love is animation. I adore Animaniacs, Ren & Stimpy, Rocko's Modern Life and Tiny Toon Adventures. I'm also a Disney [ http://www.disney.com/ ] Animation freak, with all of the obvious modern classics being my favorites.

Motion isn't necessary for great art though. I also love cartoons in general. These range from Gary Larson's masterpiece The Far Side to the somewhat less wonderful creations of my own demented skull "Rob's World" [ http://www.slashdot.org:80/rw/index.shtml ], a collection of scanned in cartoons, and Digital Ink Inc. [ http://www.slashdot.org:80/malda/di/index.shtml ] - a collection of my cartoons created for electronic media like WWW sites.

When I am not spending every waking moment of my life handling school and work, I also moonlight as a computer nerd. I spend a lot of time coding in C, C++, various database languages, shell scripts, perl and various other interesting languages. I love dinking around with Linux, and various internet related programs. I was using Netscape [ http://www.netscape.com/ ] long enough to remember how cool version 1.0 was. That makes me an old geezer in web years.

I do some programing, and a lot of graphic arts including drawing cartoons and raytracing wacky graphics for my web page. My latest hobby has been computer animation. Using assorted Nifty graphics tools I've successfully created several animations that suck when compared to Toy Story. But they're still neat. Eventually when I have a few worth showing off I'll throw them on-line and then you can make fun of them.

My other major love is humor. My idols include the mind blowing Monty Python, the absolutely fabulous author Dave Barry, the absolutely fabulous television show Absolutely Fabulous, the Kids in the Hall, Mel Brooks, ZAZ, and all that other wacky stuff. I'm also a MST3k buff. For those of you who care, I am Mystery Science Theater 3000 Fan Club Member #42346.

I'm a computer game nut as well. I love Doom [ http://www.idsoftware.com/ ], Hexen, Descent, Flying Carpet, Duke Nukum 3d [ http://www.3drealms.com/ ], Quake [ http://www.stomped.com/ ], the Leisure Suit Larry series and the Space Quest series. I bite hard at most action games though- my teen brother frags me out at Doom with scores of 100 frags to 40, so let us never speak of this again. My latest accomplishment was beating Id's [ http://www.idsoftware.com/ ] shareware Quake on Nightmare. Ok, so I'm not Romero, but I have fun. The only reason I leave Linux [ http://www.slashdot.org:80/malda/linux/index.shtml ] these days is to play WarCraft II anyway.

I'm currently employed at TheImageGroup [ http://www.imagegroup.com/ ]. I handle everything web related for them, and in the process have worked on several cool sites as a site designer, a CGI-BIN scripter, HTML Coder, SQL Head, Web Master, and just about every other conceivable task for a net geek like myself. My best work includes First Michigan Bank [ http://www.fmb.com/ ], Woodland Realty [ http://www.woodlandrealty.com/ ] and a half a dozen other smaller, very cool sites.

In closing, I would just like to say that if you read this whole document, then you need more of a life than I need for typing it.