Good question.
The condensed version:
In Real Life, I'm John Bafford. I'm a software engineer specializing in developing dynamic database-driven websites. I graduated from the University of Maryland at College Park in May 2000 with a degree in Computer Science. The picture to the right is what I looked like during the Summer of 2002. Older pictures of me can be found here.
In my spare time, I also work on various open source projects and other software. I play D&D. I listen to music or play games when I get bored.
The long, drawn out version that you probably don't care about unless you're trying to stalk me:
In the years before college, I attended Woodbridge Elementary School, Johnnycake Middle School (now Southwest Academy), and Woodlawn High School. Woodbridge was easily the best of the three, although they all had their good points.
At Woodlawn, I was on the cross-country team for four years (and only because my parents wanted me to be on a sports team so I would appear "well rounded" to prospective colleges). I also worked on the school's newspaper, The Calumet. Starting off as a Layout Assistant in my Freshman and Sophomore years, I became Layout Editor in my Junior year, and Editor-in-Chief my Senior year. Interestingly enough, the quality of the paper dropped each year, but that was because we had almost no good writers and because the Jouranalism department was grossly underfunded by the school administration: we had to have fund raisers and bribe students to pay for the newspaper (buy a newspaper, get extra credit in English class) in order to sell newspapers!
In college at the University of Maryland at College Park, I spent four years in 5139 Ellicott Hall, eight weeks during a summer in New Leonardtown, and a summer in Old Leonardtown. (And since you're not likely to ask why I spent four years in the North Campus Slums, it's because there was a dining hall right in the back yard, and was close to all my classes. Not that that helped me get to any of them on-time.) If for some bizarre reason why you want to see what my dorm room looked like, hit the Virtual Dorm Room Tours portion of my Photo Gallery.
There's more to tell, but I don't feel like typing anymore. Come back later if you want to learn more, or just romp around the stuff that's available on this site. It's more fun to update the other stuff than write an autobiography, anyways.
Online Life
Besides Real Life, I have been active on BBSs and the Internet since the late 1980s.
Some of you may have known me as "Dark Shadow". I ran a BBS in the Baltimore, MD area, Mirror Reality (FidoNet 1:261/1500). It went down in August 1996 when I moved to colllege. Before then, though, it was the longest-running Mac OS-based BBS in the area, having been up for over two and a half years. Mirror Reality began life as The Parallel Universe BBS, running the Hermes II BBS package. Mirror Reality was a beta site for Hermes for about a year before it went down. At one point, I had plans of bringing Mirror Reality back to life after college, but therecent growth of the internet has somewhat killed that hope. (I didn't even see it coming!) I haven't even called any BBSes since sometime in 1996.
In September 1995, I got my first Internet account. It wasn't long before I found IRC. IRC servers back then only allowed nine-character nicknames, so I abbreviated my alias to "DrkShadow". Using the old IRC client Homer, I found my way to EfNet #macintosh. I didn't stay long, however, as Homer kept disconnecting me after three minutes. I couldn't figure out why, and assumed there was something wrong with the server. Of course, it didn't help that the people in the channel were laughing at me. Turns out it was Homer's channel list flooding me off. Go figure.
Trying to figure out what was wrong with Homer, I eventually wound up in Undernet #macintosh. A helpful op, Rimmer, suggested I try a different IRC client. The client worked, and rather impressed by thre friendliness of the people on UnderMac, who actually answered my (admittedly dumb) questions about IRC, I decided to stay. It was at this time, I changed my nick to "DShadow". This is how most people know me. Most because, without a doubt, there are more people who know me online than know me in real life.
I became a regular on UnderMac, and about nine months later, earned ops. I became a server op on phoenix.az.us.undernet.org about a year after that. Currently, I'm not an oper, since phoenix delinked due to continual attacks from script kiddies. I suppose I could have gotten an O: if I really wanted to, but I didn't want to deal with the internal politics.
Recently, I've started hanging out on OpenProjects.net in #php. It's a great place if you're into PHP and SQL programming.
