About Me

My name is James, but everyone calls me fwaggle (pronounced “fraggle”) or Jamie.

I was born in 1981 in a historic coal mining town in rural Australia, and grew up with computers from a very young age (you could almost say my parents were “early adopters” of technology), and also from a young age developed a passion for programming - from the moment I learned to move the balloon sprites on my C64 using POKE, I became obsessed with learning to crash them into each other.

I wasn’t even in high school and I was cracking software, which eventually spread to [h|cr]acking computer and phone networks. As a teenager, I spent many hours on the phone to a girl in Argentina - what would have been multiple thousands of dollars worth of phone call had I not zapped myself multiple times hacking a payphone. This behaviour lead to some difficult times in school, being banned from the computer labs thrice and my penchant for skipping homework making maintaining good grades rather tricky.

Somewhere around this point my overinflated ego and the enjoyment I got from knowing I was better than most of them led me to participate in IRC warfare on MSN’s chat network (now defunct, or at least they don’t let IRC clients on any more), some collateral damage of which was a small obscure chatroom which belonged to a girl named Sabriena. By some weird twist, I ended up moving to the USA and marrying her. We’re now coming up on 18 years of marriage.

We had a son, Duncan, in 2010, and the three of us emigrated back to Australia in 2012 where I worked as a Pilot Vehicle Operator for a few years and we saw every state except Tasmania. While I don’t regret the experiences we had doing the Pilot vehicle thing, we certainly didn’t make the money we thought we would - we lived comfortably but any time we got some amount of money put away, some disaster would happen and eat it all up again.

We eventually wound up that business so I could concentrate on the final year of my university studies, which I finished in 2018. By that time I’d already taken a job working remotely for a managed WordPress host, which despite the fact it consists of many of the technologies that I hate, everything cancels out and I actually really enjoy my work (which mostly consists of kicking hackers out of WordPress sites).

I can surf, skateboard (at least, I can “surf skate”) as well as do a few tricks on a 20" BMX. I held a rank of 4th Kyu in Shotokan Karate-do and once held a belt of some color or another in Judo with the Judo Federation of Australia - I think perhaps 7th Kyu at the highest.

I’m not only opinionated, I’m at times downright arrogant. I’m working on this. I try to maintain a neutral stance on most disagreements, having the ability to see both sides of an argument that I don’t have a stance in - but when I’m right, I’m right. It is because of this arrogance and condescending tone that I frequently begin writing forum responses only to delete them un-posted.

I’ve been zapped by 240v (Australian) exactly 3 times and by 110v (US) at least 10 times, and I still stick forks in the toaster.

Here are some more pages about me:

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fwaggle

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