Greetings, fellow geek. My name is Cat “The Marauder” Chapman, and I’ll be your guide today.Your guide as we take a look inside my head.

I am a geek girl (paradox), born on January 13th, 1992. Do the math to find my age.

For those of you who are incredibly lazy and only like to read silly lists, then wait no longer, as I have fulfilled your craving.

Cat likes:

• Computers
• Linux
• The Chernobyl Disaster
• Nuclear technology
• Cats
• Photography
• nVidia
• Weird people
• British people
• Making fun of British people
• Making fun of anyone (but it’s mostly British people)
• Audio of any kind
• Atheism and Agnosticism
• Smart people, people I can learn from
• The Super Nintendo Entertainment System
• The SNES’s sound chip, the SPC700
• Math (especially Geometry, which I obsessed over in 10th grade)

Cat dislikes:

• People who judge others for stupid reasons
• Tobacco
• Normal people
• Hypocrisy
• People who try to shove their religion down my throat.
• Stupid people
• Religion (but I will respect yours, if you have one)
• The Macintosh operating system.
• People who take life too seriously. Enjoy yourself.

Now, for the long, drawn-out paragraphs explaining myself.

I’m a computer geek. Have been ever since I can remember. My earliest memory is sitting on my dad’s lap, playing “Reader Rabbit” when I was but two years old.

I’m a Linux user. I use Ubuntu and GNOME. Don’t like it? Suck it.

I’ve been using Linux regularly since I was 13. I first tried Ubuntu, but couldn’t get much anything to run.

I discovered Xandros, and I thank that wonderful operating system for getting me into Linux. It was that distribution of Linux that taught me how to properly use apt-get, and ndiswrapper. Thank you, Xandros. You’ll always have a place in my heart.

I have three cats. Figaro (Figgy), Blacky, and Pip. Figgy is an aggressive black and white tuxedo cat, and Blacky is a very docile, lovable black cat who is quite large. Pip is a ginger tabby who is small and very sweet. Blacky acquired me in 1998, Figgy in 2000, and Pip in 2007.

I also have a dog. A Pembroke Welsh Corgi, named Captain Jackie after Captain Jack Harkness from the Welsh TV show Torchwood. She’s a pain in the ass, but she sure is cute.
I also have a leopard gecko of an unknown age, named Gex after the videogame character. I got him from a friend.

No. I won’t go out with you. I’m with this guy. Now piss off.

You can contact me using various methods.

My AIM is Billy G Pwns, with or without the spaces.

My email is Nerdiphied @ (this website).

And, for those of you who hate change, here is the old About Page Content:

Hmm, I’m bored. LET’S UPDATE THIS!!!

Caitlin (Cat) A. Chapman (thaaat’s me!) was born on January 13th, 1992 (pretty sure it was a Tuesday), at about 2:45 PM. I was one month early, I should’ve been born somewhere around Valentine’s day. Anyways, this makes me 15 as of this writing. I live in Camp Verde, Arizona, and I love it here.

You can see what I look like by viewing this gallery.

My mom said that I was very hard to take care of. It took me hours to fall asleep, and I kept her up all night.

My obsession with computers started very early. My earliest memory is of me sitting on my dad’s lap, playing Reader Rabbit. I was two years old. I don’t remember what kind of computer it was. I wish I did.

My dad says that I would walk up to him with “these big ol’ eyes” wanting to go on the computer.

I think I was three or four when we got our next computer. It was a Macintosh. PowerMac or something. As much as I hate Macs, it was a great computer. I would be in this room all the time, playing some game like “The Lion King Activity Center”, or “The Playroom”, or “The Magic School Bus Explores The Human Body”.

I basically claimed that computer as my own.

And here’s where the revolution happened. My aunt sent me some computer games. A bunch of Magic School Bus games (Which I still have! And still play!). Windows-only Magic School Bus games.

So I bugged the living shit outta my dad to get a “Windows computer” as I called them. Eventually he did. He bought one of them Gateway 2000 computers. It had Windows 95.

I was amazed by this incredible machine. I was out in his “office” (we have a separate building that houses my dad’s workly things, such as his computers, files, etc) all the time. I was always seeing what I could do on it, like changing the wallpaper, the screensaver, cursor, etc. My dad was annoyed by it, but I was amazed.

This was the time where I started begging for my own computer. My aunt, being the godsend she is, gave me one when I was 7 or 8 (I think I was 7). It was an old Sony VAIO with Windows 98. Fantastic computer for it’s time. So we hooked everything up, and I was in heaven. My dad even gave me unfiltered Internet access!

This was the time where I could really experiment with everything.

See, this was MY computer. Not my dad’s. (My mom isn’t a computer person.) So I could do whatever I wanted on it. Let’s see if I can recall the specs of that computer…

I’m pretty sure it had a Pentuim or Pentuim 2 with 280 megahertz (ouch), with 16 megs of RAM (maybe 32), god knows about the video card (it could play The Sims and Sim Theme Park and such, so I was happy), a 3.2 gig hard drive, but it had an incredible 17″ monitor with built-in speakers.

Then I went over to my friend’s house. They had one of them Intel Play Digital Movie Creators (I still have mine!)

I wanted one.

So I saved up my money, and my mom and I went to go buy one. I checked the system requirements, and I was pretty sure my computer was up for it.

One problem though: RAM. This required more than I had (I think I had 16, this required 32.)

The solution to this? My dad bought me a new computer. A $200 Linux computer. Linux was removed, of course. (But if they left it on, I would probably be a lot smarter. Or not! You never know.) They put Windows 98 on it. This computer was wonderful. It had an AMD Athlon (or some AMD thing) with 733 megahertz. It had 64 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gig hard drive (that I just recently sent to Staci), and a decent video card. It didn’t come with a monitor, so we just used the Sony monitor that came with the VAIO.

This computer was a dream come true. My games ran smoothly on it, and I had Internet access.

So the experimenting really started. I was installing things I was clueless about. One of them was that WebTV thing (don’t ask me why. It was there.). That fucked up the Internet. Nothing would load.

So we called a computer dude, and he just reformatted and put Windows ME on there.

Now, I know that people complain about Windows ME a LOT. I don’t know why, because ME almost never crashed on me. Maybe it’s because I mostly used it for gaming and Internet.

But the thing I REALLY dug about ME: System Restore. My dad’s computer got upgraded with a new motherboard and ME, and I was watching the little intro video, and saw the System Restore thing. I was like “How COOL is that?”

I really loved (and still do love) this System Restore feature.

Fast forward a few years. About 3 years ago. February. That makes me 11 at that time. I’m screwing around on the Internet, and I get bored and pop open Paint for no apparent reason. The computer locks up. I just think “Oh well.” and press the reset button. Computer starts booting, then it makes noises at me. It’s basically screeching at me. It won’t boot. So it basically fucked itself in the ass. I don’t know what caused it, but the computer was fried. (Maybe it was an overheating problem, I don’t know.)

So I went into my dad’s bedroom and said “Daaad… the computer’s broke.”

So my dad decided that it would be a lot easier and cheaper to just buy a new computer than to get this one fixed. I was overjoyed as fuck. So we checked out Dell and Gateway. Dell seemed like the best deal.

(Now, I’ve been wanting a new computer for awhile at this time. My dad got a new Gateway at that time with 1.2 gigahertz, so I wanted a computer with *.* gigahertz, too!)

So we ordered a Dell Dimension 4600. And so the waiting began.

Two weeks later, Phillip is over at my house. We see a UPS truck. I get excited. It drives past my house. It stops. “Back up! Back up! Back up!” I say to the truck as Phillip and I are watching through the window in either my computer room or the dining room. (I don’t know why I’d be in the computer room, but whatever.) The truck backs up. It pulls into our driveway. Phillip, my mom and I run outside and see this guy lugging big Dell boxes out of the truck. I wanted to kiss that UPS guy. I was tempted to give him a hug. But instead I hugged the shit outta my mom and Phillip.

My dad wanted to hook up this computer the next day. Nuh-uh. No way.

So my dad, Phillip and I hooked up the computer. We turned it on, and my dad, being the ass he is, made an explosion noise the second I pressed the power button. I wanted to kick him.

So anyways, that good ol’ Dell is the one posting this.

Specs are below.

Current Computer Specs: Dell Dimension 4600 (a little over 2 years old) w/ an Intel Pentium 4 2.8 ghz & Hyper-Threading, 1.5 gigs of RAM, one CD/DVD-ROM, one CD/DVD-ROM/CD-RW (48x), Turtle Beach Rivera sound card, NVIDIA GeForce 5500 Overclocked w/ 256 megs of video memory, one Western Digital hard drive w/ 80 gigs & 7,200 RPMs, one Western Digital hard drive w/ 200 gigs & 7,200 RPMs, a generic floppy drive, 8 USB 2.0 ports, and some other crap that you probably don’t care about.

So here I am now. My Operating System preference is, in order of liked most to liked least, Linux, Windows, Mac.

My Linux distro of choice is Ubuntu Linux 6.06 (Dapper Drake).

I dual-boot with XP Home and Ubuntu (version mentioned above). Windows usually just sits there, and sometimes runs games and programs that I can’t get to run/don’t have any alternatives for on Linux.
My favorite PC games include (in no particular order): Unreal Tournament 2004, Doom 3, Age of Empires (with expansion), Age of Empires 2 (with expansion), The Sims 2 (preferably with expansion), Fable: The Lost Chapters, StarCraft (with expansion), Warcraft (all 3, with expansions)), Diablo (both, with expansion), Age of Mythology (with expansion), Roller Coaster Tycoon (with expansions), 3D Movie Maker, Caesar 3, Sim Theme Park (with gold edition stuff), Black and White (with expansion), Streets of SimCity, SimCity (2000 or 3000), Zoo Tycoon (1 and 2, with expansions), The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind (with expansions), Dungeon Siee (with expansion), and Dungeon Keeper 2.

I’m also heavily into C++. I do almost all of my C++ work on Linux. Linux seems to compile things much faster, and I like bash much, much more than the DOS-style command line.

I prefer CRT monitors over LCD. In my opinion, CRTs are more reliable, work better, you get better quality with them, and overall I just like them better than LCD. Plus, they’re less likely to break if you punch them!

When it comes to the royal battles of vi VS GNU Emacs, I have no preference. I use vi more often, but I like Emacs as well. I mainly use vi more because it’s quick, is command-line interfaced by default, and it’s easier to type “vi” than “emacs -nw”. I use vi for my C++ programming.

My preferred browser is Mozilla Firefox. If you don’t like Firefox, Opera is a great alternative. For those of you who need Internet Explorer, check out Avant Browser, which is based on IE.
When it comes to desktop environments, I prefer GNOME. If they made a GNOME-based Windows Shell, I would ditch Explorer for it in a heartbeat.

I am a member of the Phoenix Linux User Group (PLUG).

Now onto more personal stuffs:

When it comes to sexual orientation (think gay, straight), I consider myself mostly straight. Sure, I have my homo moments, but those are usually late at night. You know how people get when they stay up too late!

I’m currently in a relationship. My boyfriend is Steve, my IDE cable, who had to be replaced with an EIDE cable. I expect this relationship to last for a long time, so don’t ask me to date you.

According to the doctor’s scale as of yesterday (as of this writing), I am 115 pounds. I’m putting this here so I don’t forget.

I’m five-foot-something. Maybe 5′2″. I’m not very tall.

I have a slight obsession with the Chernobyl Disaster, and pretty much nuclear energy in general.
I am also the proud owner of superduperbuttsex [at] gmail [dot] com.

If you need to contact me, either use the address mentioned above (note that only Evolution on Dell (my desktop) is configured to recieve mail from that address), or email me at nerdiphied (AT) nerdiphy (the) soul (dot) com.

I’m on AIM. My screen name is “Billy G Pwns”, without quotes, with or without spaces.

I’ve got a phone number. Yep, sure do.