About

I am and remain….I think….Darin Van Raes.  I live and breathe in Northwest Illinois in an area called the Quad Cities.  More specifically I live in the town of Moline, IL.  This town’s only claims to fame are that it was frequently mentioned in the sit-com “Rosanne” as that is where her mother lived before moving in with them on the show, we famously turned down “the mall scene” in “The Blues Brothers” movie and while not specifically in this town, Rock Hudson died in the Quad Cities.  Yeah, not much to talk about here.

I grew up in the neighboring town of East Moline (pretty creative bunch they are) and have migrated all around the Quad Cities finally landing here in Moline.  The only real time I’ve spent away from here is when I went to college in DeKalb, IL and when I was in the service where I spent time in South Carolina and Georgia.  Despite my clear boredom here in the Quad Cities, I do like living here as it has pretty much everything I need.  Its not a HUGE town but its not a small town either.  We have all the normal amenities you’d expect in a town of half a million.  Additionally, we have some of the cheapest housing prices in the country here so its not too tough to make a decent living in this area.

My background and most of my career have been spent in the networking side of Information Technology and any expertise I have tends to be hardware centric.  I dabble in things such as this blog and website setup but I will never be a developer nor do I want to.  Staring at code is not my idea of fun.  Unfortunately even I have to do it from time to time.  Regardless, I have spent a ton of time in my life working on PC’s whether its for work or for family and friends.  I also am a gamer and have spent a good portion of my adult life playing PC based video games and building the requisite custom gaming machines for myself and others.  I certainly have a comfort level with the hardware and software that make a gaming PC hum.

This site has gone through many many iterations and I’m hopeful that I can stick with what has been an evolution of my presence here on the web.  This domain originally started out as a family website that I figured I’d maintain easily… but I unwittingly made it into something that would be impossible to maintain and before I knew it I had let it deteriorate to the point that I gave up.  My next plan was to simplify things and create a blog site that would just be a placeholder for the domain.  This worked quite well as it required very little effort on my part and again it was forgotten.  Luckily, the domain came up for renewal and I was forced to make a decision on whether or not I’d let the domain go or keep paying for it and make it into something I could use.  I chose the latter obviously and this site, in its current configuration, is what I have come up with.  It will remain a blog site, but I am going to put a little effort into the content that is out here and I hope to let it become an outlet for me to discuss my opinions on pretty much anything.

I enjoy writing and I’m excited to get started blogging away.  I believe I have finally come to the realization that this site is more a “diary” than anything else as I do not have any grand expectations that I will have lots of visitors.  For those who do happen upon this site, I want it to look and feel well done and make their experience here as easy as possible.  That amount of effort I can spare.  As for the frequency of the posts out here, who knows?  I may or may not continue to invest time here but for now its exciting and I have a considerable amount of enthusiasm for it.  I spend a lot of time on Facebook and Twitter and knowing that I can now easily interact with those sites through this one makes it even more appealing to me.

So, have a look around and if you feel like it, leave me some feedback.  There is not a topic out of bounds here and I don’t want to restrict myself to any sort of blog genre.  This is just my little playground and I don’t particularly care if anyone but me gets anything from it.  Thank you for visiting the site and I hope this provides you with an explanation of the content provided and tells you a little about me as well.  Please feel free to contact me with any questions.

Toodles,

Darin Van Raes