I am 27 years old at the time of writing this, male, and happily married for just over eleven months now. I was born and raised in the city of Abbotsford BC, then got a Commerce undgergraduate degree University at UBC and then lived in Vancouver BC for nine years. Since June 2005 I have been living in Seattle WA while my wife, who is an American, is attending school here at the UW getting her Doctorate of Pharmacy.
Abbotsford BC is a highly conservative and religious town, and when I was growing up it was not very ethnically diverse. I was raised by a well off family from the Mennonite Christian sect and attended a private religious high school after a public elementary school. By comparison, Vancouver BC is highly liberal and highly secular and is very ethnically diverse. This difference in culture gave me chance to compare the two, and I’ve found that I highly prefer the lifestyle of a modern urban city like Vancouver where you can walk down the street and not really feel like you are a minority or majority, where the biggest issue of the day is not how to impose one idea of theology on everyone but instead how severe a punishment to give to a woman who killed a tree. Okay that’s not a completely fair summary to either one, but you get my point I hope.
Living in Seattle WA has given me an additional perspective. It is always difficult to know for sure when you have lived somewhere most of your life if you really like the way things are there, or if you are just accustomed to the way things are and don’t want change. We’ll see if this changes over the course of the three to four years I’ll spend in Seattle, but right now it seems that indeed I really like Canada and Vancouver, not just because that is what I am used to but because I actually do prefer them. I’m living in the “U District” which is the residental area that surrounds the University of Washington, so there are some cool things nearby but it’s no Vancouver by any means.
Since one of the usual questions when you meet someone is “what do you do?” I suppose I should answer that too. My recent immigration to the United States went very slowly and until very recently was stuck in an ugly limbo where I was unable to work — but thankfully this has finally changed and I have got all the paperwork I need. I now have a job as a Database Developer at a local software company that I’m extremely happy with.
So in case that wasn’t clear enough, I’m a wee bit of a computer geek. I know a lot about the internet and even manage my own webserver which hosts several dozen websites for myself, my friends, and family. I care a lot about Open Source software such as Linux and Gnome and have very strong feelings about the importance of open standards both on the internet and in application software. Sometimes in my spare time I contribute to open source projects like Gnome and Ubuntu and as you’ll see I write abut these a fair amount as well.
If you actually read this, you already know way more about me than you probably wanted to. Lucky you!
