Biography

After 500 posts at this Web site, I still find it difficult to cobble together anything resembling a respectable, if mini, biography.

I am a professional journalist, or more specifically, a professional copy editor. This means I am paid to read newspapers. It sounds like a dream job until you tack on the editing part — editing the newspaper is not an easy task. If you like walking on egg shells and patiently explaining to coworkers that their baby is full of enough holes to sink the page, maybe it is the job for you.

I was born in Royal Oak, Michigan, just outside Detroit, but currently live on the Chaoyang-Chongwen border in Beijing, China.

I ended up here for a variety of reasons, one of which is my girlfriend. More likely, I heard so many idiots in the US tell me, “If you don’t like it here, then leave!” So, I did. The talented people flood out of the US, and other countries’ talented people flood into the US; that seems to be the talent flow under “globalization.”

In my free time, I develop in PHP, and am very interested in using the language for non-Web application development.

I used to translate video games, and worked on translations actively from 1996 - 2006. My more notable translations are Langrisser I, Der Langrisser, Hydlide, The Crest of Gaia and Kid Niki 2.

I also created the NINJA and NINJA2 patching standards, a patch format that resolves many of the interleaving and header problems associate with various ROM formats.

More recently, I did the work to make WineLocale happen. It is a simple shell script available for Debian-based systems to allow Wine to function in multiple encodings. The Wine team still lists their on their “to do” list. That means it will not be fixed until some time around 2015, so in the mean time, use my solution.

Education

Work history

Relevant links