Twelve Black Code Monkeys

My name is Levi Wallach and I’m the creator of this website/weblog, Twelve Black Code Monkeys. In my day job I work as a web developer and have done so for the last eight or nine years, but was developing web pages as a hobby for a couple years even before that. I started my other web site in 1997, first devoted to book reviews, then to DVD reviews. I’ll give some biographical info below, but I thought I’d first briefly talk about this blog and how it came about.

The first question a lot of people ask me about is “what the heck does the title of your blog mean?” It’s just an amalgamation of some of the things I like. Twelve Monkeys is one of my favorite movies. The Black Monk is one of my favorite short stories. And you might just call me a code monkey. Plus, monkeys, come on, how could you resist naming something using monkeys???

Somehow I missed the whole blogging phenonmenon until a friend of mine who had his own mentioned the term to me back in 2001. After Nine Elleven pushed blogs more into the mainstream, I heard a show about it on NPR, and I finally decided to start one myself soon afterwards. But I really didn’t get going until doing some serious research on blog hosts back in the Spring of 2003, and finally picking Blog City as my Blog Host. I decided to concentrate on a few core interests like gadgets and technology, health and nutrition, and audio books, but have ventured into other random places like my travels abroad, and incoherent rabling rants on various topics simultaneously.

As time went on, I developed more of a style, which is basically to take a news item I’ve seen somewhere, or just a thought I’ve had, and expand upon it with my own takes of various issues around the topic. I sometimes try to explain terms and ideas to those who may be new to them, but otherwise I at least try to give readers enough respect to figure most things out on their own. I also try to be as fair and objective as I can. Everyone is biased to one degree or another, but I at least try to be fair. Luckily, I haven’t delved into politics or religion or anything that can really test one’s objectivity, although some may consider my commentary on health and nutrition pretty impassioned.

In September of 2004, SBC saw fit to syndicate me for their Project DU. In addition, I’ve posted some gadget reviews here that have been pretty popular and hopefully very useful. In particular, I have a comparison between the T-Mobile Sidekick (the original Black and White one) and the Blackberry 7230, as well as a comparison between the Color Sidekick and the Treo 600. As a lover of gadgets and technology, I am always looking for opportunities to test and or review products or services, so if you work for company that makes/offers such things, please email me. If you would like to send tickets to a trade show or convention, I would of course be interested in covering it for my readership.

Speaking of readership, they vary a lot from week to week both in numbers and in makeup. Looking at stats right now, it seems that at least 12% are international (outside the

U.S.), but maybe more.

Why am I using

Blog City? I realize that for many bloggers out there, the fact that I don’t host my blog somewhere and just use a home-grown tool like Moveable Type, maybe loses me a few geek points. While I still consider myself a geek in many ways, I also now have a full life that involves attention to other things. I no longer have endless hours to tinker with this application environment or another if I don’t have to. While once it might have been fun to do this in my spare time, having developed (and still maintaining and tweaking) a full website developed from scratch first with Cold Fusion then with ASP, I know how time consuming it can sometimes be.

Blog City has a tremendous set of tools and functionality that I can take advantage of out of the box with very little effort. No installing additional extensions, no altering code myself, if I need to customize anything, it’s pretty straightforward and quick and I can always do a bit of hacking if I really want to.

Ok, enough about the blog already, what about the blogger? As I mentioned, I’m a web developer by trade, but I came to it in a kind of indirect way, as many of us do.

I currently reside in

Vienna. No, not

Austria. That’s one of the places in

Europe I’ve yet to visit. Rather, it’s Vienna, Virginia in the

U.S. I grew up in the heart of

New York City –

Manhattan - and went to Bank Street School for Children and Friends Seminary. I then moved on to Boston University where I majored first in Astronomy, then in Journalism, and finally in Russian Language and Literature. I also went to

Leningrad State

University in what is now

St. Petersburg

Russia during a semester study abroad program through CIEE. That was back in the fall of 1990 right before the coup, so it was still the

Soviet Union then. After graduating, I went to work for CIEE back in

New York City again and assited with their study abroad programs in

Russia and Eastern

Europe for a couple of years. After that, I headed to

Charlottesville, VA, to get my Masters at the University of Virginia in Slavic Linguistics.

Unfortunately that’s where the Russian saga ended. My interest in computers, which had been growing since trading in my commodore 64 for an Atari 800XL, took over as I got fascinated with the internet and the nascent World Wide Web. I started developing simple web pages with notepad in 1994, and after getting my Masters and going to work as a tech-support rep for a software company near DC, I helped them set up their first web page. I eventually got a job doing web development exclusively for a government contractor and ended up missing the whole whole dot com/dot bomb thing, sheltered to a certain extent from much of the craziness. I never worked for a startup, drank martinis and smoked cigars, got stock options, or anything like that. I never made ridiculous sums of money, but I also never got laid off, so I feel lucky all the same, although still secretly a little envious of those who got to take the ride.

In addition to web development and gadgets and technology in general, I’ve been interested to increasingly in digital photography. My father was a professional photographer and I actually did some photography for my high school newspaper. After selling my Nikon FE-2 to pay off some debts after college, I forgot about photography until a friend bought me a Sony digicam back in 2000. I’ve been trading up each year and in July just got my first digital SLR. My wife has a side business in photography which I’ve assisted her with from time to time, so I’m sure I will just get more involved with this as time goes on. I’ve amassed a decent collection of images so far, but strangely enough haven’t mastered Photoshop to where I’m comfortable doing much post-processing, although this is a current self-training project.

Another big interest of mine is health and nutrition. I’ve been moderately overweight since I was a kid, so began dieting at a fairly young age. This eventually led to lots of reading about nutrition and health, and forays into lots of different kinds of diets. I’ve finally settled on one that I feel I can do for the rest of my life – I’ve already clocked over four years on it – and so I don’t even consider it a diet anymore. It’s called Protein Power and is a low-carb plan similar in some ways to Atkins, but with a much more science-based, wholisitic approach that emphasizes whole foods, resistance exercise, and maintaining a minimum level of protein consumption. I help to moderate a discusssion forum on Protein Power, where I go by the name dvdmon. I wrote several articles for a low-carb magazine, and I’ve created a small site that discusses Protein Power and my experiences with it.

I’ve also started/and or help moderate a few Yahoo! Groups, including one for the Audible.com audio-books group, the Danger Sidekick group (which I’ve passed on to others since I know longer own one), and the Broadvoice (Voice over IP Telephony) group, which unfortunately had to be retired due to lack of use.

That should cover a lot of bases, but there’s a lot more discussed in my actual blog, if you aren’t by this point as tired reading this bio as I am writing it! That is if you’ve actually read this far! Karate Explosion!

 

Last updated - a long time ago! This needs lots of updating!