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Background
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 and a new baby girl named Allison. I drive a Honda Civic with a Yakima bike rack, she drives a Honda Element. 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.
I discovered many of my passions in high school. My sophomore year, I joined our award-winning high school newspaper, The Panther’s Prey as a page designer and reporter. After serving as News Section Editor my junior year, I was promoted to Editor-in-Chief, along with this guy.
It was in those three years I was introduced to the Macintosh. It changed my life. I grew up playing with my parents’ Windows 95 machine and the Mac blew my mind. I helped transition the Prey from OS 9 to OS X, which only increased my knowledge and excitement for the platform.
I attended the University of Memphis and majored in journalism after a two-year stint chasing an art degree. I was hired by The Daily Helmsman as “the Sports section layout guy” as an incoming freshman. I found out later the Helmsman never hired incoming freshman. I was promoted to News Editor my second semester, and laid out almost every page the paper produced for three years.
Four years into school, I took a job as a sales guy at the local Apple Store to help pay for my wife’s engagement ring. My tech side quickly was discovered, and I was offered a full-time job after a few months.
So I went from being a full-time student to a part-time and began working as a Mac Genius.
Six months later, I was promoted to the Lead Genius position and quit my job at the newspaper. Being Lead meant managing my team of young Geniuses and keeping the angry people at the Genius Bar as calm as possible. It was the hardest job I’ve ever had.
After two years, I left Apple to manage a start-up Apple Authorized Service Provider. It was a lot of fun to see Apple tech out in the real world — not just from behind a Genius Bar. Most days, it was a lot of fun, but some days it meant unloading hundreds of iMacs in the rain.
Current Work
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 stuff. Basically, everything I love, with a good cause driving it all.
I’m also putting the finishing touches on my journalism degree, and should be done pretty soon.
I have a dogcow tattoo on my ankle. I was featured in The Memphis Flyer’s 20 Under 30 feature 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.
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.
I’ve disabled comments on ForkBombr on purpose. You can read why here.
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. And an iPad.
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, and was done by my friend Carl Fox.
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.
If you get lost, check out the 404. Really.
