Colophon

About Me

Hello. My name is Stephen Hackett. I live in Memphis, Tenn. I married my high-school sweetheart, and we have a cat and a toddler who is a patient at St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital. I drive a Honda Civic, she drives a Element. The cat doesn’t have a car. We’re looking for corporate sponsors for Baby #2, due July 31.

I grew up in a lower-middle class suburb outside of Memphis, and now live inside the city. I love it here, no matter how crazy it gets. People complain about it here, and I just don’t get it. It’s what happens when years of hatred define so many things, but I have hope things are changing.

After being editor of my high school newspaper, I thought I wanted to work as a journalist when I grew up. It took 4 years of college and  “real world” time in the field, I decided it wasn’t for me.

So I left school and went to work for Apple as a Mac Genius, and ended up Lead Mac Genius at our local Apple Store. Be impressed – my in-laws were. After almost two years, I left Apple to help build a new Apple-Authorized Service Provider. After a year and a half, I realized that if I could take apart any Apple product without looking at the take-apart guides, it was probably time to move on. So in February 2010, I started as the I.T. Director at The Salvation Army Kroc Center here in Memphis. I know I usually roll my eyes when people talk about a “dream job,” but this really is one. I get to work with all sorts of tech and design web and print materials. Basically, everything I love, with a good cause driving it all. I love it.

I have a dogcow tattoo on my ankle, and I’m currently back in school finishing my degree in Internet Journalism. I was featured in The Memphis Flyer’s “20 Under 30″ this year, and am an active volunteer with Operation Broken Silence, the Greater Memphis Greenline and The Have A Standard Foundation.

About ForkBombr

Naturally, ForkBombr focuses on my biggest interests: Macs, design and the way we get news. Often, those three things cross paths.

I started ForkBombr when I left Apple in 2008. At the end of 2009, I posted this, saying I was putting the site on hold:

I decided to simplify in 2010. I’ve stopped checking Google Reader religiously, and am toning it down on Twitter. I’m writing for me for the first time in years, doing some research for Operation Broken Silence, working to improve Memphis with various groups and causes and — most importantly — spending more time with my family.

A friend wrote this to me in an email the same night I posted that article:

Life is too short and too complicated to be halfway paying attention because a multi-billion-dollar corporation is thinking about launching a new consumer product that I can’t really afford.

So, why is ForkBombr still alive and kicking? Well, that’s complicated. I really missed writing about the tech and design industries. It’s like a drug and I’m a junkie. That said, moving forward, commentary on Apple news won’t be posted as often. It’s hard to keep up with everything, and the world doesn’t need another site re-posting Apple news. There are 1357 other sites that can do that, if that’s what you’re looking for. Expect longer, more thoughtful posts, fewer times a week. I don’t promise a new item on the front page every 4 hours.

Many people ask me about the name of the site. Wikipedia:

A fork bomb works by creating a large number of processes very quickly in order to saturate the available space in the list of processes kept by the computer’s operating system. If the process table becomes saturated, no new programs may start until another process terminates. Even if that happens, it is not likely that a useful program may be started since the instances of the bomb program will each attempt to take any newly-available slot themselves. Not only do fork bombs use space in the process table: each child process uses further processor-time and memory. As a result of this, the system and existing programs slow down and become much more unresponsive and difficult or even impossible to use.

Basically, a fork bomb is programming that jams your machine into neutral and puts the gas pedal to the floor until the engine gives up. I bought the domain from a friend for two slices of pizza and a coke. True story.

Geeky Stuff

My home machine is a 24-inch 2.93 Ghz aluminum iMac running Snow Leopard. I use an Apple Extended II keyboard because it feels like a dream and sounds like a train. During the day, I use a work-supplied 15-inch, 2.8Ghz MacBook Pro with 4 GB of RAM and the matte display. For a phone, I carry a Motorola Droid. After carrying iPhones for almost 3 years, I was tired of it, and Verizon beats the pants off AT&T in most of Memphis. I have a clamshell iBook and an eMate 300 I use for writing.

I backup my machine to a Time Capsule at home, to a rotating set of hard drives I keep off-site. Mozy is my out-of-Memphis data safety net. If you aren’t backing up your data, you’re asking for it. Hard drive crashes are just like car crashes: (1) Everyone has them and (2) seat belts save lives.

ForkBombr runs on Wordpress. I post articles with the wonderful MarsEdit. The theme and a lot of the PHP is homemade. Stats are tracked with Mint. The transparent .png used for the logo doesn’t render in Internet Explorer 6.

Photos are edited in Aperture 3 and Photoshop CS4, after being taken on my Canon Rebel XT or Canon Powershot G9.

Finally, I believe in adhering to web standards, and (frankly) ForkBombr was built to look good. That said, if it looks bad, it is probably your browser’s fault. In fact, ForkBombr doesn’t work quite right in Internet Explorer 6, mainly because Internet Explorer 6 is dead. Move on to something better like Safari or Firefox.

The Fine Print

I’m totally hip to you using stuff I write on ForkBombr. Just link back to the source.