Who I am. No, really.
I am currently a web designer living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. That said, let's get on with it.
I was born in a backwoods area of southern Michigan in the mad heat of the disco era. That was 1972, when Pong introduced the video game craze, the VW Beetle became the biggest selling car ever, and the pocket calculator was invented by Texas Instruments. That's right. I'm as old as the pocket calculator.
Exciting stuff. Anyway, I briefly lived in a brick house where rodents roamed freely through the walls. Once my dad got a job, the Masugas could afford to move to a stylish pad featuring floral psychedelia in the kitchen. (see exhibit a) Orange and brown were in, as were corduroy pants and those cowboy-like shirts that had goofy pearl-looking snaps instead of buttons. My dad, always a trailblazer, briefly (but not briefly enough) sported a perm (exhibit b).
exhibit a - No wonder my brother could never keep his food down.
exhibit b
In the early 90's I studied painting at the University of Michigan. I don't know why either, but it might be due to the fact that the only way I felt accepted in High School was when, in study hall, I handed out drawings of beheadings, hangings, and other macabre material to the "oohs" and "ahhs" of the type of kids that went and smoked on the corner between classes.
In college I believed art created on a computer wasn't "pure" and was therefore trash. This website is evidence that I'm right. I finished with a B.F.A. shortly before U of M's painting department went down in flames because all the money was going to "new media." Feh. "New Media." Perhaps I was the demise. You decide. (please see exhibits c, d, & e)
exhibits c, d, e
The Evil Tickle,
The Birth of Fear,
Untitled (Landscape)
I then moved to New York City where I shared a hot, cramped, roach-infested apartment above a Chinese restaurant with dozens of noxious chemicals and lead-white paints. Hey, at least it was safer than my job at Pearl Paint, where, as a lowly stocker of shelves, I was surrounded by thousands of noxious chemicals and lead-white paints. And, you know, it takes a REAL man to go downstairs for a cheap Chinese dinner every night, witness roaches crawling on the counter as you wait for your delectable meal to be prepared, and then actually take the stuff back upstairs and eat all of it without thinking twice. Two years later, penniless and depraved, I moved back to Michigan where I haven't painted since. Well, OK...ONCE. For about 20 minutes.
I'm now married to the wonderful Marie and we have a black lab named Parker. I don't see either of them very often because entirely too much time is spent in the "cave" with my Apple G5, 23" display and my 12" iBook.
The web really is my hobby. My calling. Where the hell was it when I was in High School? I'm really into messing with HTML, CSS, PHP, and Flash. I'm working my way towards an understanding of Ruby and Rails as well. My tools of choice are Photoshop and Illustrator for graphic work, TextMate for coding, Transmit for FTP, and Virtual PC for testing webpages in Windows.
I'm basically into figuring out anything that might stand in the way of putting pictures of myself in diapers with a bucket on my head on the web for your enjoyment while simultaneously constructing really long, drawn-out, run-on sentences. Thanks for visiting! You can email me at: ryan [at] masuga dot com.