The SnarkDreams Emporium of Oddities

Biography

Name: Zach Tomaszewski

Email: zach@snarkdreams.com

Recreational Interests: Sleeping, building fictional worlds for RPG games, trying new beers, playing old school computer games, watching movies, traveling, reading fiction, finding parallels between unrelated fields of thought, hiking barefoot, snorkeling, people-watching, keeping my computer tuned, adding to the WWW, day-dreaming.

Current Scholastic Interests: Interactive narrative/drama, computer game design, conceptual metaphor, information architecture/web design, programming languages, WWW protocols.

Random Events from my Past:

I've flown ultralights, used an electron microscope, and dissected human cadavers.
As a child, I lived on a sailboat for a year.
In college, I participated in a 60-hour sensory deprivation experiment.
I've eaten crocodile.
I attended the WWW2002 conference.
I didn't finish 11th grade until October of my freshman year in college.
I have visited 28 countries.
(Australia, Austria, Canada, Cyprus, Djibouti, Egypt, England, Fiji, France, Germany, Greece, Hungry, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Kenya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mexico, Netherlands, Oman, Spain (Balearic Islands), Sudan, Taiwan, Turkey, UAE, USA, Yemen.)

Basic Timeline:

Sept. 1978	Born in Midland, Michigan, USA
1980 - 1983	Lived on the Chesapeake Bay, Virginia, USA
1983 - 1990	Lived in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Attended a British elementary school.
1990	Lived on a 33-foot Hans Christian sailboat named Clove of Seasons. Sailed from Abu Dhabi, around the Arabian Peninsula, up the Red Sea, to Turkey. Did 6th grade through a correspondence course
1990 - 1991	Lived in Izmir, Turkey for 6 months, attending a US military school. Made a trip to Manistee, Michigan for 6 weeks when buildings in our neighborhood were blown up by terrorists opposed to US involvement in the Gulf War.
1991	Returned to the sailboat and sailed to Spain.
1991 - 1993	Sold the boat and moved to Traverse City, Michigan, USA. Completed part of 8th and all of 9th grade there. Made some very good friends; I have returned to Traverse City for at least a couple weeks every summer since then.
1993 - 1994	Lived in Bandung, Indonesia for 9 months. Did 10th grade by correspondence.
1994 - 1995	Lived in Traverse City, Michigan and Phoenix, Arizona. Learned to fly ultralights in Phoenix. Did 11th grade by correspondence and fell far behind schedule.
1995 -1996	Returned to Abu Dhabi, UAE. Did my senior year at the American school there. My parents still live there; I usually visit them once or twice a year.
1996 - 1999	Attended Alma College in Alma, Michigan, USA. Completed my bachelors degree in Philosophy in 3 years. Joined Theta Chi fraternity during my last term.
1999 - 2000	Took a year off and spent it in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Considered medical school, but realized that would be a mistake. Followed a long-standing love of books and a new interest in the Web into starting a career in information science. Also backpacked around Europe for a month with my best friend.
2000 - 2001	Moved to Honolulu, Hawai'i, USA. Got my masters degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Hawai'i in a year and a half.
2002 -	Stayed on at UH to get a PhD in Communications and Information Science. Served a teaching assistant for the Information and Computer Science Department. Still working on the PhD...

More pictures: Me, in Photographic Retrospect.

Back to the SnarkDreams Emporium of Oddities (personal)
or to Z.T.name (professional).