About the Author

An ongoing account of the author's life

Garrett Murray was born in Washington and spent the first 17 years of his life watching television and making jokes. In 1997, Garrett moved to New Jersey where he spent the last two years of high school avoiding schoolwork.

In 1999, Garrett attended a university now famous for a murder, eight stabbings and a shooting all occurring on campus in two years. He spent most of his time playing Counter-Strike and making funny short films and sketches.

In 2001, he left to work in the IT department of a major financial firm in downtown Manhattan, but it was short-lived. From September 11, 2001 to February 1, 2002 Garrett was unemployed, living in a basement apartment he was 'renting' from his parents (renting in quotes because renting usually involves actually paying rent). He doesn't like to admit it, but he worked at Barnes & Noble for a time when things were really rough and he needed to pay the bills.

In 2002 he finally got a new job in New Jersey at a small, doomed web design company and moved into a new apartment with his friend Steve. After the doomed company finally started to fall apart, Garrett and Steve started their own company, but it was short-lived. Late in the year, Garrett started working in Manhattan again at another doomed web company.

In early 2003, Garrett and his girlfriend, Katia, moved in together in Brooklyn, New York. For their first valentine's day in the apartment, Garrett bought them two cats, Oscar and Felix. At some point, Garrett started working on xPad, an OS X application, and started doing lots of freelance work. In fact, Garrett spent most of 2003 working. 2003 was a busy year. In late 2003, the second doomed web company finally fell apart and Garrett got a new job at a non-profit medical research company in Tribeca. He didn't apply for the job, they just called him. It was weird. In December of 2003, Garrett released xPad. People seemed to really like it.

In 2004, Garrett took his first trip to Europe (London and Dublin) and then his second only a few short months later (to Sicily, Italy). He managed to convince Katia to let him get a really great camera and he started taking a ton of photos. And, finally tired of only talking about doing it and not actually doing it, Garrett and his friend Shawn started making short films. They released three in 2004.

Garrett switched jobs twice within the span of 3 months in 2005. Both moves were good, though, and Garrett feels like he's in a really good place right now. Garrett and Shawn released their best short film to date, The Egregious Meatball, in June...

About the Site

I hope you're ready for lots of useless information!

This site has been in existence since 2000. On the site's second anniversary, I deleted the first 150 entries because they were terrible. Since 12/2001, there have been 371 entries written by me and 1855 comments posted by visitors. The three most popular entries are Music Suggestions, Please, On the Subject of Smoking and Tabular.

Here comes an acronym attack: Maniacal Rage is an XML-driven, hand-coded system. The site uses MySQL for data storage and PHP to create valid XML which is then transformed using XSL and delivered to your browser in valid XHTML. This data model was initially inspired by Daniel Bogan.

What you see is written in valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2. The site also conforms to Section 508 standards for accessibility. Every page of this site can be viewed in valid RSS 2.0 or Atom formats, allowing for syndication of any section (or conversation).

Maniacal Rage is hosted by Segment Publishing, who I most definitely recommend. Fast servers and fantastic service.

Everything on Maniacal Rage (other than specific trademarks and products or property made or sold by others) is copyright 1997-Present Garrett Murray. This includes source code and design, so please, don't be a jerk and make your site look just like mine. Also, please remember to provide credit and/or a link whenever using or quoting anything from this site elsewhere.

About the Setup

I have way too much stuff

Both of my machines use an Apple 20-inch Cinema Display. The PC utilizes the display via an Apple ADC to DVI convertor, but only when I want to play a PC-only game. Other than that, I never plug the display into the PC and instead access it from the Mac via Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection application. I use a LinkSys Wireless-G Broadband router to broadcast a WiFi signal to the PowerBook and the Airport Express, the G5 and PC are plugged in via cable.