My name is Damon Parker. I am a freelance coder / sysadmin / internet consultant / writer. I have been freelance nearly my entire professional career. My 6 month stint in the corporate world back in 1999 seems like a lifetime ago, too many meetings where nothing was accomplished, too much time wasted on non-productive tasks. I feel freelancing gives me the ability to direct my talents where and when they can best be utilized (plus I like to travel).

I currently divide my time between a dozen long term clients and a few personal projects, I am finally taking the time to get off the ground. We are in the early stages of rolling out a new site in the costumes network of PlatinumCostumes.com / PimpCostumes.com / CostumeShoes.com as well as many todo items still lingering from last seasons Halloween and Pimp Party circuit. I provide PHP coding, systems architecture, systems administration and general business consulting services for these guys. I also currently performing systems admin services for a large forums site which involves a cluster of load balanced servers.

My pet projects include a framework for web application login and user maintenance called XPassport, a new service aimed at increasing ROI of existing ecommerce sites (more details shortly as launch approaches) and a simple screen saver, ShellSaver that is capable of displaying text from any application or shell script that outputs to stdout.

My interests are highly varied among technical, economics, politics, travel and religion. There isn’t much I don’t have an opinion on as you will see if you spend much time here.

I have blogged in various capacities over the last three years, professionally, personally, stopping and starting several times depending on where life takes me. Here I will try to collect my thoughts over the past years and forward.

All of the photos in the header, sidebar and gallery were taken by me during one of my travels.