A Modest Construct

The Man

Ben [Heliologue] lives out the phrase “specialization is for insects,” with interests ranging from literature to computer science, linguistics to physics, music to philosophy. He is an iconoclast, an æsthete, a political liberal, a casual Hobbesian, aspiring poet, and ironically, not a basketball player. He actively worries about the proper use of adverbs, has written scathing critiques of operating system software, has debunked comparisons of quantum mechanics to Taoism, and stays awake at night thinking about semantic markup for internet documents or the relative benefits of endnotes v. inline citation. He tries to read a minimum of two books per week, and has had entire conversations consisting only of puns.

He currently works as an Applications Programmer at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, IL, with a focus on Java/JSP development and user interface design.

He prefers his audio in FLAC, his documents in ODF, and his software OSI-approved.

Sorry, ladies, but he’s happily spoken-for.

The Disclaimers

Please note that if anything here offends you in any way, you are entirely free to stop reading at any point. I don’t do very much self-censoring, and so the posts contained herein may contain language, ideas, and images that may be inappropriate for the young and the conservative. The standard README applies.

Also note that this is a personal blog on a vanity domain, unconnected in any way with my place of employment. Though I may occasionally blog about work, the content and opinions presented here in no way reflect the views of my employer or colleagues.

The Site

A Modest Construct has been around in some form or another for many years, first as garbled poetry collections on free webhosts, and then finally residing at http://heliologue.com since November of 2004. For several years, the blog was known as Schrödinger’s Cat Is Dead, until the named was changed in January of 2006 (in part because the “ö” character got mangled in trackbacks and feeds). You can see my post about its various iterations.

It’s currently hosted on Dreamhost.

A note about the current site layout and structure: I’m using a rather heavily modified Brajeshwar theme. I’ve abstracted a lot of the semantic class-generating logic from my previous Barthelme theme into a separate plugin which you can use as well.

I use jQuery as a javascript framework; I use Brian McAllister’s Unobtrusive Tablesort Script because it beats the pants off Tablesorter, though I’ve moved its init functions inside of jQuery’s $(document).ready().

I use the Silk icon set from Famfamfam.

The Tech

• The Workstation (built August 2007)
  • Case: Lian-Li PC-V2000Bplus II Black Aluminum
  • Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-N680SLI-DQ6 (nVidia 680i)
  • PSU: Seasonic S12 Energy Plus SS-650HT
  • CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 [2.4Ghz]
  • Memory: Corsair XMS2 4GB(4 x 1GB) (PC2 6400) QUAD2X4096-6400C5DHX
  • Video Card: EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS (320MB)
  • Storage
    • Western Digital Caviar WD1600YS SATAII, 160GB [System]
    • Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200AAKS, 320GB [Application]
    • Maxtor Diamondmax IDE, 300GB [Document]
    • 2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3500630AS 500GB - RAID0 [Audio]
    • 2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3500630AS 500GB - RAID0 [Video]
  • Optical Drives
    • Lite-On SATA DVD-ROM SHD-16S1S-05
    • Lite-On SATA DVD±R DVD Burner LH-20A1L-05
  • Monitor: 19″ BenQ FP91G+
  • Input: Logitech Cordless MX3200 Duo
  • Software: Windows Vista x64 SP1; Ubuntu 8.04 x64
• The Laptop: HP 8710p
  • CPU: Core 2 Duo T7100 / 1.8 GHz
  • Memory: 1 GB (PC2 6400)
  • Display: 17″ Wide XGA+
  • Storage: 160 GB 5400rpm SATA-150
  • Chipset: Intel PM965 w/ Intel 4965AG wifi
  • Graphics: NVIDIA Quadro NVS 320M
  • Software: Windows XP SP3; Ubuntu 8.04
• Network: Linksys WRT54GL (running Tomato)
• USB drives
  • Sandisk Cruzer, 256MB
  • OCZ Rally, 1GB
  • Corsair Voyager, 4GB
  • Corsair Survivor, 8GB
• Cowon iAudio 7 [16GB]

The Music

CD Collection? This way…

The Curriculum Vitæ

Papers Presented at Conferences

A Multitude of Jesuses: Christ Figures in the Work of Chuck Palahniuk. Presented at the 14^th annual Undergraduate Conferences on English Language and Literature, University of St. Francis. Joliet, IL, 2005.

εκπύροσις: Fitzgerald, Eliot, and sexual iconoclasm. Presented at the 15^th annual Undergraduate Conferences on English Language and Literature, University of St. Francis. Joliet, IL, 2006.

The Great Waste Land: Sexual Normativity in Two Works of Modernism. Presented at the 2^nd annual MUSE Undergraduate Literature Conference, Illinois Wesleyan University. Bloomington, IL, September 2006.

“It is al another than it semeth”: Chaucer and the Self-Other Binary. Presented at the 43^rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, University of Western Michigan. Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 2007.