Colophon

My name is Stephen Hackett. I live in Memphis, Tenn. I married my high-school sweetheart, and we have a cat and a baby boy who is a patient at St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital. I drive a Honda Element, she drives a Civic. The cat doesn’t have a car.

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 and now work for a local Apple-Authorized Service Provider. But my dogcow tattoo remains on my ankle, and I’m finishing my degree in Internet Journalism.

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

My main machine is a 24-inch 2.93 Ghz aluminum iMac (4GB of RAM is a must these days) running Snow Leopard. I use an Apple Extended II keyboard because it feels like a dream and sounds like a train. My wife hates it. I also have an iPhone and some old Macs. I run Windows when I have to, but never for fun. I take a photo each day with either my Canon Rebel XT or my Canon G9.

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.

Finally, I believe in adhering to web standards, and (frankly) ForkBombr was built to look good. That said, if it looks bad, it is your browser’s fault. Internet Explorer is dead. Move on to something better like Safari or Firefox. Maybe even Chrome.