mortonfox's Journal

I was born in the UK. Lived there for a few years but haven't been back since I was 6. Grew up in Malaysia, which I refer to as the "old country", even though the country has existed for only about 50 years. Went to college at Columbia University SEAS in New York City and graduated one semester early at the end of 1994. Moved to Northern New Jersey after that and lived there for about 14.5 years. During that time, I was a software engineer working on enterprise backup software at a privately-held firm in Northern New Jersey. Got an involuntary termination in August 2009. I didn't have any real ties to the area, so I bought a house and moved to Northern Delaware.

I'm not sure when exactly I found the furry fandom but I've known about it since at least mid-1992. Back then, it was mostly on Usenet newsgroups, mailing lists, and ftp sites. Didn't go to my first furry con until Albany Anthrocon in 1997. In the beginning, I was an artist. I drew the webcomic Limpidity for a number of years but stopped a while back. I do, however, have a comic strip compilation in print. I also started fursuiting because of Anthrocon. I've had a unicorn suit, a coyote suit, two wolf suits, and a yellow/tan husky suit. (It's been a bit of a running gag that I've never had a fox suit.) More recently, I also started doing mascot gigs for charity and community events with the Hi-4 group.

I've been an avid geocacher since April 2001. Geocaching is a game of hide and seek using GPS. There are a number of varations within the game, but in its most basic form, a geocacher would hide a waterproof container holding a log book and trinkets in a public area. Then he would take the coordinates of that spot using his GPS receiver and post those coordinates to the geocaching website. Then other geocachers will navigate to the coordinates and look for the geocache. The game can be more challenging than it sounds, both in terms of navigation (the route to a particular spot may not be direct or obvious) and in terms of finding the cache. (it may be hidden in a tricky manner or it may be very small) Geocaching has also brought me to many interesting places and beautiful vistas that I would've never seen or known about otherwise.

I've also been a Where's George user since August 1999. Back then, web searches weren't very accurate so I stumbled across that website while doing an Altavista search for information on the value of some old coins I had. Where's George is a project for tracking paper money. I enter serial numbers of dollar bills (also fives, tens, etc) into the website and stamp the website URL on the bills. Then I wait for hit reports to come in. My dollar bills have traveled as far as South Korea. It's also a lot of fun finding and logging marked dollar bills that other Georgers have sent out.

I'm a heavy user of Flickr. My photostream is here. I took most of my photos at or near geocache sites, but I also have many pictures of food. Why? Because well-prepared food is an object of beauty and it would be a shame to not take a moment to appreciate it as such before eating it. I also administrate a number of Flickr groups. An area of interest of mine is using the Flickr API to automate as much of the grunt work as possible in managing the Flickr groups and my photostream. I've posted some of my scripts at randomfox, my scripting journal, but there'll be more to come.

I'm also on Postcrossing, an international postcard exchange website. (my Postcrossing profile) It's fun sending postcards to and receiving postcards from countries all over the world. Because Postcrossing is big in Finland for some reason, I tend to get and receive a lot of postcards from Finnish postcrossers but that's okay. I stopped Postcrossing after several postal rate hikes but I may pick up this hobby again later.

There's more, but this bio is long enough already so you'll have to read the journal for the rest. :)





Self-Identification for Emergency Use. See here for an explanation.