Recently in About Friendly Fire Category

I've been mostly absent from this site in recent weeks, while finishing up some outside writing projects. But I've bantered a bit with one of our regular commenters, Diane, here.

Diane wonders where she may have been "uncivil" in her own discourse, as she seeks to hold the feet of Friendly Fire writers to the proverbial fire. I believe it's usually a matter of perspective. When I criticize someone, I find my candor and bluntness to be refreshing, while others find me to be a jerk.

In that same sense, Diane probably thinks she's being bracingly candid when she responds to some FF writers and their arguments thusly:

you definitely need to take a Valium or something... calling you a "political analyst" is rather overstepping... you are practically foaming at the mouth.. Your mis-statements regarding government healthcare plans are mind-boggling... laughable... and pathetic.... racist ranting... stop being Enablers of Stupid... why don't you just stop your whining until you at least find something worthy to whine about.

If you watch TV "news", you see that it has degenerated into a Theater of Controversy, where boxing gloves are more mandatory than decency or intelligence. But we are a fame-based culture, and those who want to be on TV learn to adjust to politics-by-punching. For their trouble, they get money or at least notoriety.

But we don't get that here. We try to sound out our arguments, we think out loud, we test our ideas, and we occasionally get a response. But if we're told that our ideas are pathetic and laughable, or that we need Valium, please forgive us if we attempt to move on to the next issue without stopping to engage you.

I've been with the Daily News off and on for longer than is probably healthy. My most recent tour began in 2002, after two years at a trade publication, with my return to the paper's Features copy desk. Since September 2006, I've been blogging about technology at Click. In April 2008, I started writing a weekly tech column for the newspaper.

Since about March 2008 (things are blurring, big time), I've been a Web developer, working on the main Daily News site as well as this blogging platform.

I also write for Come on Feel the Nuys and Friendly Fire, and I have a handful of dormant personal blogs ready for anything I might kick out during a spare moment.

A quick perusal of Click would reveal that I'm deeply involved in the use of free, open-source software, including the GNU/Linux and OpenBSD operating systems and the many applications that go with them. I'm a contributing editor at LXer, which is the best place on the Web to find news about Linux and other open-source matters, and where you'll find links to hundreds of Click posts.

I wrote my first political pieces back in the early '80s while a student at Grant High School in what used to be Van Nuys for a photocopied newsletter called The Irregular Bulletin. Don't look — you'll never find them.

Whenever asked to tell about myself at parties, barbecues and such, I always feel like singing, "I was born in a ditch by a mother who left me there, naked and cold and too hungry to cry. I never blamed her, I'm sure she left hoping that I had the good sense to die."

There is not a grain of truth to it, but I always liked the song especially when sung by the soprano in "Man of La Mancha."

The straight skinny is that I was born and raised in the heartland of the US, otherwise known of as Chicago, and traveled to California at the tender age of adulthood. I have been writing since childhood and have penned columns for various papers around the country shortly after moving to So Cal.