About
Hi, I’m David Figatner. I was born on the 1973 winter solstice in Brooklyn, NY. I now live near Seattle.
I use this site (and its sister site) to share my life and hobbies. In no particular order: programming, writing stories, doodling, the-ever-popular photos (also known as "living"), and other thoughts and writings on various topics.
The current website design went live on December 31, 2007, a nice round date. I based the design on my discussions of the Seattle weather. Whenever I write, I can't resist talking about the weather. It's a terrible habit, and I hoped adding a type of weather report to the site would break me of it. The weather is now an integral part of the website as the doodle in the masthead above changes based on the current weather conditions near my house (more particularly at the Renton Airport). I pull the data from the National Weather Service website, parse it, and display the most fitting doodle. Here's the technical description of how it works. I will continue to add new doodles as the fancy (and weather) strike me.
I named my previous website design "Cornflower Blue," for its sickening monochromatic look. It lasted from February 20, 2005 until January 1, 2008. Before that there was Pencil, which went live on December 18, 2003. I briefly created a Frames design, but I realized my mistake quickly. This site also existed for a few months in different forms (first private then public), but I didn’t save much information from that time.
That's Julie, my beautiful wife, to the right. She cheers me on in my hobbies, and I'm very grateful for her support. And below her is Ziggy (on the right), our clingy but surprisingly lovable dog, and his roomate, the "Bustling Butt" Button (on the left), a beautiful and sweet dog.
Some technical information: this site is hosted over at Dreamhost after I grew tired of administering my own linux box. The entire website is hand coded in PHP and MySQL (change log). Besides the exterior changes, the weather rewrite updated the inner workings: most importantly, I moved the data from flat files to a MySQL database.
For the most part, the HTML and CSS of these pages validate. I’m not much of a stickler and I'm sure a few pages are invalid but I always say live and let live. I figure if you can see this, then it's probably close enough.
Even though he asked me not to, I want to continue to give thanks to Chuck for inspiring me to improve my website. If not for his wonderfully designed website, my website would look terrible. I’m a competitive person, and I try to stay a few steps ahead of him, especially since he majored in English Literature and I majored in Computer Science (and Philosophy!) in college. Since the weather redesign, Chuck continues to look to his laurels. Clearly he needs to respond with Liminality 2.0.
Use the comments form to contact me.
Besides the content, a good way to know who I am is by glancing through the books I read and the movies in my collection. Or throw the dice and choose a random post.
This site is 
syndicated (RSS 2.0) to support those newfangled reader thingies.