About Me

Bio stuff

My name is Ryan Davidson. This is my blog. I grew up in central Pennsylvania, and was homeschooled through highschool. I graduated from Covenant College in December of 2003 (that's one semester early, not one semester late), majoring in Philosophy and History. After an abortive exploration of the medical field atColumbia University, where I enrolled in their Post-Bac Pre-Med program, I find myself back in PA. I currently teach part-time at Covenant Christian Academy and work full-time at a Hilton Garden Inn.

Beliefs

I am a Christian. I am orthodox and fairly serious about that. I grew up in the EFCA at the Evangelical Free Church of Hershey. That didn't last very long. I had always been dissatisfied there, and left the EFCA for the PCA at my first opportunity, which was my freshman year in college.

I am Reformed, but at this point stage in the church's development, being orthodox can place you on the left of center in some areas. I find myself both more concerned with theological issues than most of the PCA, as well as being rather more liberal than most of the PCA. When I was in New York, I attended All Angels' Church, an Episcopalian congregation on the Upper West Side. I miss it sorely, as I have at the time of this writing still not found a church home where I feel I belong.

Interests

I maintain interests in politics, theology, philosophy, history, independent music and film, technology, current events, and the occasional computer-related diversionary software program. I can be expected to hold forth on any of these or other topics with little notice.

What is /dev/null?

I've been asked that numerous times. It's a reference to the *nix family of operating systems: Unix, Linux, BSD, and their varients. The directory structure is logical rather than mapping location on a physical drive. The dev directory is the place where the operating system interacts with devices: /dev/mouse, /dev/modem, /dev/usb, etc. /dev/null is the void device, the place where you send output you don't want.

Why /dev/null then? Because this is the Internet, and this space is as much for my use as anyone else's, if not more so. It's a place for me to get out in text what I'm thinking about. If you're interested in that, you're welcome to read along as I think about things out loud. Otherwise, find something better to do. I'm not assumming anyone actually reads this page, and as my stat counter has been broken since January 2004 and I'm too lazy to fix it, I have little reason to think otherwise.

About the blog

I started this blog in the summer of 2003. I was living in Chattanooga, TN for the summer (right about here, actually), and my friend Josiah had caught the blogging bug and launched Chattablogs. Who was I to say no to a free blog on a custom blog-site maintained by people I know with only theoretical bandwidth limits? So I started blogging. Haven't really stopped.

Recurring themes

If you read back through my archives, you'll find several things I return to with some regularity. I've an interest in intellectual property theory and laws. I'll periodically try to be thoughtful about certain aspects of geek culture. I frequently write about politics. I'll periodically reference "The Great War", a meme I started here, and have referenced since then. "Heroes of the Great War" is as close as I ever got to a weekly column. Periodically, I featured a significant figure from the history of the West's conflict with Islam, as much for my own edification as any other reason.