About Me
Well, my name is Alex but for just about everything I do online, I use the handle Scarista. This is the name of a village on my home island and I spent a lot of time in that village when I was growing up. Although I’ve been using the internet since around 1992, when it came to its more recent incarnation all the user names, email addresses, accounts, etc, using “alex” were snapped up really quickly so I picked “scarista” instead and it stuck.
Anyway, I’ve worked in the IT business since I left college starting off in banking, then freelancing, then working for a web-convergence outfit, then some more freelancing and now I provide network admin and support in an educational setting. I’ve worked with Windows, Unix, Linux, MacOS, and their precursors and have specified and coded a range of software from ATMs to database-driven web applications.
Recently, I’ve grown increasingly fed-up with paid for software that is either insecure, unreliable, badly designed, over-priced, swamps my hard disk with crap, or just fails to do what it says it will. So, I moved to using free and/or open-source stuff instead and have found that these applications tend to be everything their paid for counterparts are not. This led me to establish this site.
I know there are lots of other places that do this – better then I do – but it seemed worthy to do my bit to help promote some of those applications that have served me so well.
Having been around the block a bit, as it were, I have returned to my home island where I am happily married with 2 kids and 2 cats. I’ll leave it to you to decide which pair causes my wife and I the most grief. I dabble in lots of stuff including music, software development, and writing. I also try to keep up a regular stream of posts on my blog, A View From The West. From time to time I tip my toe into the waters of MySpace where I have a personal profile. Finally, I have another site devoted to collecting and trading live recordings which an be found here.
