In which one has a slight taste, a mere glimpse into the plethora of activities that Jason has made an important part of his discretionary time, in that we may assume by knowing the leisure of the man, we truly know the man.

Sometime around 1986, I was involved in a high school band with another young fellow named Jeremy Stone, and together we made singularly bizarre music with a variety of electronic toys and whatever musical talent the two of us could rub together. Together we called ourselves an appropriately high-schoolish name, in this case Bovine Ignition Systems. The cow angle in the name caused our friends and followers to begin the habit of bestowing cow-related gifts on us. This started with T-shirts and dolls and moved into a cow suit and salt licks. Over 8 years, the band produced music (and at some point I'm sure it'll end up on the Internet, like everything else) and eventually came to a close when Jeremy found his free time (and geographical proximity) sucked away by a really annoying company. However, by that time the ball was really rolling, and this cow theme took over my life and the way that people percieve me. No complaints here, though; I dig it. However, it means that I possess over 500 cow-related items, including stickers, t-shirts, notepads, greeting gards, figurines, candies, boxes, dolls, and even a couple cow-colored computers. There's no way this is going to end any time soon, and you see the cow stuff everywhere when you look here and on my other web pages. Which brings me to my main money-sucking hobby:

Why anyone would consider this entertainment is beyond even me, but in my spare time I run an ISP (Internet Service Provider) called COWZ Technologies or, as it's often referred to, cow.net. In fact, this site is currently up and running on one of my machines. The main secret to cow.net's semi-success is buying up older machines, refitting them, and then putting them up. Instead of the dozens of people who would once use the machine, we only have a few at a time, and things seem to be faster. I feel a little like a video store guy around the mid-80's, when Blockbuster came and ate everyone's meal, but nevertheless I enjoy the whole game so much that the money isn't overridingly important. Well, until I have to eat.

Since 1990, I have run a Multi-User Shared Hallucination (MUSH) called TinyTIM. Attempting to explain what exactly a MUSH is, to someone who more likely than not has no interest in joining the sub-culture, is often a less-than stellar situation. If you've ever played a text-based adventure like, oh, Adventure or Zork or the like, then you have an idea of what a MUSH is like. Basically, it's a text-based world that is used by dozens of people at the same time; they interact with each other via commands, and can make simple programs on objects and locations so that "realistic" responses occur when you manipulate them. As one of the administrators, or "wizards" as we're called, I have to oversee the daily functioning of the system as well as put out one of the copious fires that seems to rise up as a result of being open-registration, that is, you can get on any time as many times as you want. (This is a rarity in this culture.) People more interested than I in trying to get a handle on describing the feeling of using the game over time are out there; you can start looking for them at the TinyTIM Home Page.

Almost a pastiche in relation to my other free-time hobbies, I am an avid NERF® toy collector. As it turned out, the Goodwill here in Central Square, Cambridge, is well-stocked with discard toys. Buried among the weekly shipment of Mousetrap games and detective novels are always a couple NERF® toys, often in their original boxes, and usually a mere $.95 apiece! Because of this gut-busting low price structure, I have acquired over $30 worth of NERF® toys, ranging from the spectacular RIPSAW to the less than helpful ARROWSTORM to a couple broken CHAINBLAZERS. To really categorize these guns on here would be a sad statement indeed. Regardless, be assured that in those rare occurences where a NERF® war breaks out, I am ready to kick some major foam butt.