About Aaron Schaefer
I’m a certifiable renaissance man, gentleman, and scholar. I have been working in the IT field since 2002 while simultaneously earning my degree in Computer & Information Technology (specializing in Network Engineering) from Purdue University. Working full-time while earning my degree has given me a unique blend of knowledge and experience that I wouldn’t trade for anything. It’s rumored that I may someday rule the world…
If you’d like to see some of the projects I’ve been involved in, take a gander at my aptly named projects page.
My GnuPG Public Key
GNU Privacy Guard (a.k.a. GnuPG or GPG) is F/OSS that allows you to easily sign and encrypt your data. This enables you to verify people’s identities and protect your privacy when communicating online. If you would like to communicate securely with me, you will need to download my public key:
pub 1024D/50EDFCCD 2008-05-31
Key fingerprint = 7074 406E 8272 D083 1E31 2845 666F D4C1 50ED FCCD
uid Aaron Schaefer <aaron@elasticdog.com>
sub 2048g/388B7E9C 2008-05-31 [expires: 2010-08-28]You can import it from any keyserver, or by downloading the ASCII armored version manually. DO NOT forget to verify the key against the fingerprint listed above to ensure that they are the same. For more information, see The GNU Privacy Handbook.
About This Site
ElasticDog is the place where I house all of my musings on technology, standards-based web design, personal finance, the arts, programming, life, pirates…whatever strikes my fancy. I tend to write a lot of “howto” articles on various technical subjects, usually stemming from when I have to research something complicated and don’t want to forget how I did it. If my writing can also help other people, then all the better! Participation is always welcome.
Hosting
ElasticDog is hosted on a VPS from SliceHost.com along with a number of my other sites. If you’re comfortable on the command line, then running a VPS is leaps and bounds better than any cheap shared hosting, and not that much more expensive. I know bloggers are always excited to promote their web host in hopes of someday swimming in all the referral money like Scrooge McDuck, but I don’t really care about that. If just one person chooses SliceHost over Dreamhost and their ilk, then my work here is done. For all I care, tell ‘em Large Marge sent ya…
Design
Although it wasn’t my first website, I created ElasticDog when I began learning about web standards back in 2003. I started off using Movable Type as a blogging engine, and unfortunately neglected to convert all of my entries when I later switched to WordPress. Over the years, I’ve updated the look of this site a number of times…click a banner below to be transported into the past.
2003
2004
2006
2007
Current Design
The current version of ElasticDog.com was not designed by me, but is a highly-customized version of Essay, a Sandbox theme by Ian Stewart.