About Laze.net

Allow me to... introduce myself...

Laze.net is the domain owned by Ryan MacMichael. That would be me.

I grew up in Medford, NJ, attending school at Milton H. Allen Elementary, Medford Memorial Middle School, and Shawnee High School. I went to Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, VA, graduating in 1998 with a B.S. in computer science. I currently live in Northern Virginia and have worked as a webmaster for eight years at the same company (!). I'm married to my college sweetheart. We live with our daughter, a baby human named Rasine Linh (born September 16, 2006) and a goofy dog that we love to death.

My first personal site went online in December of 1994. I hosted it at my college until 1997, when I registered laze.net (because some other dope had beat me to laze.com by a few months). Since then, I've spun off a number of other sites that I consider part of the laze.net-work, including one for my record label, one for a living legend, one about a serious disease, one with my music reviews, a couple with super-short music and movie reviews, one with a small cult following, one focused on vegetarianism, and one for my college radio station. There are actually a few more, but only members of the laze.net Fan Club know about those.

My interests range from Italian cult films (giallos, zombie films, spaghetti westerns... I'm pretty sure if I ever went to Italy, I'd just run around the streets yelling, "Fulci! Argento! Bava! Giallo, giallo, giallo!"), diners and diner culture, music, and cooking. I'm one of those people that hates poor customer service and will gladly pay a few dollars more at a local, non-chain store to keep from supporting large, dominating corporations as much as I can. I like beating up yuppies who talk on their cell phones while standing in line at the supermarket. There's also some joy in punching someone in the nose just for owning a car that costs more than four years of college tuition.

Actually, those last two things are kind of lies. I've never punched anyone, let alone beaten them up. But it might be fun.

I'm proud to have developed a few stalkers in my time, folks that can quote large portions of my site back to me, word-for-word. It may seem like a dubious distinction, but really, it's quite flattering.

Out of all the things I've learned from the Internet, the most important is this: anyone who can read something on your site, will. If it's someone famous and you've praised them (or lambasted them) on your site, they've probably seen it. And sometimes, they'll even get in contact with you.

Other small lessons I've learned from the Internet: (1) sometimes 16-year-old guys actually turn out to be 45-year-old guys, (2) people will believe anything, (3) people will take offense at anything, (4) my mom reads what I write, so I should never mention sex in any form or fashion, (5) my dad doesn't read what I write, but I know my mom tells him about it, (6) coming in as the first result on Google for a company you have a grudge against is an awesome feeling and gets results, and (7) the Internet Archive can either be a great thing or an embarassing thing.

I used to have a script on my about page that encouraged people to "ask me anything" about myself, but I got tired of deleting the messages that read "you're a penis" and questions about carnivals. So, if you want to know something else about me, use the fancy contact link and please, don't be an ass.

Some techie stuff about the site...

This is the first major overhaul of my site, which has allowed me to use XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 2 for all new pages. I can guarantee, though, that not every page on this site validates, mainly because I don't have the patience to go through 7 1/2 tons of blog entires and escape every amperstand in every URL I've ever linked. But web standards are incredibly important on today's web and we've entered a period where Netscape 4 just doesn't cut it and not everything should be surrounded by tabletrtd's.

Everything is tested with the most recent version of Opera and most stuff is also tested with the most recent Firefox release and IE6.

Though I write a lot of the behind-the-scenes scripts on my sites, I make copious use of Movable Type for all things blog. I use Flickr for photos stuff, but there are some old photos laying around managed by Noel Jackson's chief-groovy-loo PhotoStack.

I host with both Site5 and 8-95.com and can happily recommend both as reliable hosts.

Privacy policy, copyright, etc.

Personal sites shouldn't have to have a privacy policy, so mine doesn't. What you see is what you get. I'm not selling your address, but if you post it to my site, other people may be able to see it. I also may make use of your comment in a future book or some such. By posting here, you agree to that.

I haven't yet decided which Creative Commons license to use for my site, so for now, let's say that all content is Copyright ©1994-2009, Ryan A. MacMichael. If you want to quote something, go for it. If you want to cite something, go for it. If you want to steal something, ask first.