My name is Paul Steckler. I am not this guy although he seems like a nice enough fellow and is also in the computer industry. During the day I work at Microsoft and have for nearly thirteen years now. By night (and early morning) I putz around with web sites, WordPress, Ubuntu. I also dream of retiring and traveling a lot. And in the hours I spend away from my lovely wife and kids I run and bike (once upon a time I swam too but cold water and bad swim-form just don’t mix).

The story of Bricin: in 1995 my wife and I stayed at a lovely B & B in Killarney, Ireland. At breakfast one morning we were chatting amiably with another couple. The couple was celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. The husband had 50 yellow roses delivered to the dining room. The proprietress, Kathleen, was a very kind woman. It was sunny. I relate all this just to set the mood, it was romantic and wonderful and very Irish. Kathleen made some suggestions about wonderful things to do in Killarney. Lovely walks, lovely lakes, and a nice little town full of shops and art galleries. She suggested we stop by the Bricin, a place of local art. I piped up with, “Bricin… that would be a great name for a dog!”. The mood was shattered, absolutely shattered.

Needless to say months later when we adopted a 2 year old black lab from the Humane Society we named him Bricin (pronounced bri keen, accent on the second syllable). When web sites became popular I bought bricin.com and bricin.net. Years later the art gallery contacted me and asked for bricin.com back. I agreed; they did after all have first claim to it. They sent me a lovely watercolor of Killarney which we still have in our house.

So bricin.net — is my attempt to both share some thoughts I have on interesting topics and is also the testing ground when I need to learn a new technology. The exerblog is the fifth iteration of an exercise-tracking application. The first was in Excel, the second in Access, the third using Outlook forms (I was a program manager on that), the fourth used DHTML and data-bound web pages (before AJAX was a term anyone used), the fifth and current using ASP.NET when I wanted to learn C#. The main page is a WordPress blog. I wanted to learn what tools were out there and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. My next learning project is likely to be something like Ruby.