skurfer.com

I'm Rob. I believe tubing is a rough water sport and it's possible that I'm down with P.E..

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People that know a lot about computers want to use Macs. People that don't know a lot about computers need to use Macs.

Latest from Twitter

Having seen only the trailers for both movies, I'm gonna say “Bitch Slap” looks better than “Sucker Punch”. Discuss. • 2010-Jul-28 19:48:57 via Twitter for iPhone

Wow. Milwaukee's Best Light is union made? Imagine how cheap it would be if those jerks weren't involved. • 2010-Jul-27 18:12:04 via Twitter for iPhone

I hate Twitter this time of year. Makes me feel like I'm the only one in the world not at #SDCC. • 2010-Jul-24 09:21:15 via Twitter for iPhone

Ah, now I remember why I never gave Pandora a shot. http://twitpic.com/1zf702 • 2010-Jun-23 23:46:24 via Tweetie for Mac

@wilshipley Mac OS X has OpenAL support, right? But are there any devs that have bothered to enable multi-channel in their Mac games? • 2010-Jun-23 08:03:53 via Twitter for iPhone

On those poor, duped Tea Party folks: http://www.skurfer.com/politics/events/why_are_you_hitting_yourself • 2010-Jun-16 16:07:41 via Twitter for iPhone

@gruber Without that movie, how are we to know that “The world is not enough” comes from Bond's family crest? Yeah, OK. Not worth it. • 2010-May-7 11:39:03 via Twitter for iPhone

Just gave Google Chrome a test drive. 5 minutes. Deleted. • 2010-May-7 10:41:19 via Twitter for iPhone

We need another couple of seasons! #SaveOurSeeker • 2010-May-1 09:16:18 via Twitter for iPhone

We need a season 3 of #LegendOfTheSeeker • 2010-May-1 07:57:13 via Twitter for iPhone

I thought $33 was the cost of seeing Mastodon. The true cost is apparently waiting for this awful openning band to finish. Yeesh. #fb • 2010-Apr-30 21:21:47 via Twitter for iPhone

Baroness was pretty good. Though they kinda remind me of The Sword… and don't quite measure up. • 2010-Apr-30 20:30:53 via Twitter for iPhone

At The Vogue. Waiting for Mastodon. Who's with me? • 2010-Apr-30 20:20:28 via Twitter for iPhone

“The TSA: Disarming the good guys since 2001.” #fb • 2010-Apr-17 13:52:37 via Twitter for iPhone

Mastodon is playing at The Pub. Who arranged this magic? • 2010-Apr-17 01:39:08 via Twitter for iPhone

Someone played The Sword at The Pub? A) How? B) Awesome. #fb • 2010-Apr-17 00:56:31 via Twitter for iPhone

Cars have been towed. We will be delayed. • 2010-Apr-16 19:35:24 via Twitter for iPhone

Corndog city! • 2010-Apr-16 16:22:43 via Twitter for iPhone

In Atlanta! • 2010-Apr-11 16:24:42 via Twitter for iPhone

@gruber “Cross-platform software toolkits have never … produced top-notch native apps for Apple platforms.” Do you include Carbon? I do. • 2010-Apr-9 10:46:04 via Twitter for iPhone

About this site…

Let's start with my domain name, skurfer.com, in case you came here via some search and you're thinking "'the heck is this? Some guy's personal web site?" I learned how to skurf in 1988. Ever since then skurfing has been my favorite recreational activity and when I discovered the Internet, I always thought it would be a cool name to have. When I got around to registering a domain in 1999, it was still available, so… there you go. For those interested in skurfing, I do eventually plan to have some information here. I own 6 boards that show the evolution from the original Skurfer, to the modern twin-tip compression molded wakeboards. Now, about that word, "wakeboard". You may have heard this sport more commonly referred to as "wakeboarding" (as in by every single person since 1993). I don't participate in that crap. When my friends and I got into this sport, the Skurfer was the only board in existence, and so it was called skurfing. I see no reason to change that. Call it giving credit where credit is due, or nostalgia, or whatever. The other word is perfectly acceptable as a noun, but not as a verb. By the way, I'm stubborn.

I'm a computer nerd. This nerdhood pays the bills, but I also enjoy it on my own time. There's always room for improvement with computers. Always some new shortcut or cool setting to discover. In fact, when everything is stable and working great with my computer, I often feel like "Well, now what am I supposed to do with it?" I've used all sorts of operating systems, and if you really wanna know, the best by far is one called NeXTstep. NeXTstep supported more than one mouse button, had a graphical web browser (and the first ever web browser), an e-mail client that let you send pictures and even record a voice message, it let you drag-and-drop just about anything to just about anywhere, and it was very stable. Sounds like Windows, right? Well, Microsoft is getting close, but I'd like to point out that these features were being enjoyed by NeXT users while the rest of the world was getting excited about Windows 3.0 - at least 10 years before Windows XP. These screenshots should give you some perspective as to what the competition was like in the late 80s. In 1997, Apple bought what was left of NeXT and adopted the greatest OS ever for their next-generation system and renamed it Mac OS X (although, if you ask me, it was NeXT that took over Apple). I primarily use a Mac now, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, but... much like my refusal to accept the term "wakeboarding", I refuse to think of myself as a Mac user. I mean, I can accept that it's now called Mac OS X and that it's now owned by Apple. Apple took something great and has, for the most part, only made it better. I take issue with some of the changes, but there are no deal-breakers. But considering how absolutely God-awful the previous Mac OS was, I'm hesitant to tell people that I'm a Mac user, because almost no one understands the difference between switching now and switching in 1999. Being a Mac user in the 1990s had nothing to do with making an informed choice. You just had to drive a Volkswagen, vote for Democrats, bathe whenever you got around to it, and pass your time by thinking about how superior you are to everyone else (and have an inexplicable tolerance for a mouse with only one button and a computer that locked up every 20 minutes). I guess the best way to sum it up is this: I didn't "switch" to Apple… My OS did.

E-mail the (me). If you want, here is my PGP public key.