The Craptank

A simple question with a difficult answer... The Craptank is a stupid little website created by me, j-man, in an attempt to entertain... myself... sometimes at the expense of others. Think of it as an anti-blog. You wont find much in the way of shitty journal-esque stories about my day or what I ate for lunch, nor will you find much of anything along the lines of those myspace pages that are so popular these days. What you will find is a random collection of turds (I'll explain in a second) posted by myself and some of my friends. Consider this place a collection of random things that we think are interesting, funny, amusing, entertaining, and enlightening. One of the goals here is to make this a place that you'll visit on a regular basis just to see what's going on in this tank of random crap.

A "turd" is what we (affectionately) call the posts/entries on this site. Not trying to suggest anything about the quality of the content or that of the authors. It's more a statement of how things shouldn't be taken so damn seriously all the time. You'll find that they'll range from the outright offensive, to the humorous, to the serious... tho all equally worthless. Like little nuggets of joy.

The Craptank started out as one of those free xanga sites (remember the days when livejournal was popular?) that I put together during my junior year of college. It started out with the inspiration from a good friend and served as a way to keep myself entertained when I got some free time. I chose xanga in particular because it was free and there were several ways to hack the code to remove all of the advertisements, which was fun way to stick it to the man. The original 'Tank died off after I became too busy or lazy to update it. The final nail in the coffin was when my university web account expired about 6 months after graduation, thus breaking nearly all of the image links that had been created.

One of the problems with the old version of the Craptank was that it quickly became locked in a set writing style which made it more difficult to update regularly. The new incarnation of the 'tank, what you are reading here, will have a much broader scope instead of only content that is meant to offend. Sure you'll still see much of that, but you can also expect a much wider range of content. This new version also takes care of another shortcoming of the original in the form that friends will be able to contribute directly.

The site was designed and tested for Firefox 2+ and IE7+ (win). It is functional on IE6, however user experience will not be as good. I have not tested with other browsers or operating systems, however if your browser follows web standards as well as Firefox does, then there should be no problems. If there are problems however, drop me a line and i'll try to fix. The site itself is built on about 6000 lines of custom written code rather than a pre-packaged solution as it allows me more flexibility. I figure it's better to build something from the ground up rather than spend the same amount of time hacking apart the existing software and trying to get it to do exactly what I want.

As explained before, I don't use this site as a vehicle to talk about myself very often, however for those wanting to know a little bit about who I am, here goes.. I was born in York, Pennsylvania in July '81. Grew up in PA and went to college at Penn State, where I managed to get a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering. About 6 months later I moved to Everett Washington, which is about 25 miles north of Seattle. I'm currently working as an Engineer for Boeing. Exciting eh?