About Jason Kottke

Hi, my name is Jason Kottke. I currently live in Manhattan with my wife Meg. For fun and income, I build web sites and edit kottke.org. My favorite font right now is Whitney by Hoefler & Frere-Jones. Being generally sober, level-headed, and trustworthy, I'm usually the guy that's chosen to drive. The moment between feeling either really really hot or really really cold water and knowing which of those temperatures the water actually is, I like that in a central, undescribable way.

I believe that when people talk about solving problems with technology, what they're usually talking about is solving problems with design, which is to say, the application of psychology in a visual & functional context. I prefer red wine to white, movies to films, jeans to khakis, vanilla to chocolate, Pixar to Dreamworks, the subway to taxis, nonfiction to fiction, and Safari to Firefox. I use a daily face wash in my "T-zone" area. I look like the guy in these photos. I find going to the dentist relaxing. I've lived in WI, IA, MO, MN, CA, NY, NH, and, briefly, France. I don't have a plan.

Need to reach me? Get in touch.

 
A reverse chronology of my life (updated June 2007)

2007: Currently happening...

2006: Got married.

2005: In many ways, the opposite of sucked.

2004: Sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked.

2003: I'm having performance anxiety about this whole year summary thing...

2002: Crikey, now I'm in New York. Can't quite figure out how I got here. Not exactly a point A to point B kind of thing.

2001: Despite much interest, I'd never been to Europe before this year, when I went three times in the span of 6 months. Paris and Antwerp in May, London in July, and Berlin in October. I would like very much to live in Europe.

2000: Finally made the move to San Francisco after thinking about it for a couple years. Definitely a big change for a small town boy like myself.

1999: I think this was the year I really and truly discovered the joys of sour cream. I never used to like sour cream....and then I started eating a little on baked potatoes every once and a while. Now, it's practically an obsession...I even tried sour cream on pizza. It wasn't too good.

1998: Fell in love for the first time.

1997: The Year of Growth.

1996: My dad and I went to Bejing, China for 6 days. I had a really good time. The Great Wall was the highlight of the trip, although I also played basketball in the Forbidden City. Really.

1995: I finished my senior honors thesis in two weeks. All 60 pages of it. The surprising thing is that it turned out well. Others thought it turned out really well and gave me some awards and money. I also dropped out of grad school to pursue a dream of sorts. Surprisingly, that turned out well too. Others thought it turned out really well and gave me some awards and money.

1994: Sega NHL '94 is simply the greatest video game ever. My college roommate had a TV, and I had a Sega Genesis & NHL '94. At any given time between 9am and 10pm, 7 days a week, there were usually 2 to 6 people in our room playing that game. I'd leave for class with a bunch of folks watching or playing, coming back three hours later to find a completely different group worshipping at the shrine of NHL '94.

1993: Frosted Flakes for dinner every single night gets to you after a while. And all those girls should stay away from that frozen yogurt machine.

1992: This was kind of a lost year in my college career. I can't really remember anything significant (or insignificant) that happened. Stagnant stasis.

1991: I used to have one of those Levi's 501 Jeans "Button Your Fly" t-shirts. One day at college, someone called after me, "Hey, Button-Your-Fly! You play volleyball? We need an extra player on our team." I removed my shirt and joined the game. I didn't wear that shirt much after that.

1990: "Hey son, are you going to college?" "Ummm...I dunno." "Hey son, you're going to college." "Ok."

1989: I used to love the Final Four. I was in several pools at school, I watched all the games on TV, and read just about anything on the subject I could get my hands on. The culmination of all this interest and effort was the final game of the '89 tournament: Michigan vs. Seton Hall. We all watched the game in Derek Warner's living room, about half of us, myself included, rooting for Seton Hall, and the other half pulling for Michigan. The game went into overtime and Michigan won. I think it was the best game of basketball any of us had ever seen...before or since.

1988:

1987:

1986: Like the JFK assassination for the Baby Boomers, the Challenger explosion was the significant event for members of my generation. I watched it happen live on TV in Mrs. Dennis' classroom. It blew up, Mrs. Dennis said, "Oh my God, oh my God," over and over again, and then the bell rang. Being the first student to arrive at my next class, I told the teacher somewhat matter-of-factly that the Space Shuttle had blown up. She too was horrified. A few minutes later, there was an announcement over the loudspeaker.

1985:

1984: All the other kids were ordering sticker books and MadLibs out of the Weekly Reader book club. Me? I ordered a special edition of George Orwell's 1984. Of course, I also had sticker books and MadLibs.

1983:

1982: We played softball in the warm spring air on one of the last days of school. My teacher, Miss Skrenes, invited her fiance to play with us as well. I remember thinking that all my hopes and dreams of ever marrying her were gone forever. My performance on the diamond suffered accordingly.

1981: I watched President Reagan's swearing in and the subsequent release of the American hostages in Iran. Reagan was the first president that I ever knew; I learned about Jimmy Carter later in school.

1980: I distinctly recall my 1st grade teacher, Mrs. Pederson, teaching us about leap years and about how 1980 was a leap year. 1980 remains to this day, for me, a magical year, not because anything significant happened to me or the world, but simply because of its leap status.

1979:

1978: Coming home on the bus from kindergarten one day, my nemesis was being particularly annoying. Being a kid of action in those days, I reached across the aisle of the bus, pulled his stocking cap down over his face, and popped him one right in the nose. It bled, and my parents were mad at me. I don't think he ever gave me much trouble after that.

1977: Star Wars came out in May, but I don't think I went to see it. My parents weren't big movie fans and I was only four, so even if we did go, I wouldn't have remembered it. My first memory of Star Wars comes much later, watching the VHS tape at my aunt's house with a VCR the size of Encyclopedia Britannica.

1976: My sister was born in August of this year.

1975: It was around this time that my parents moved from the Twin Cities to rural Wisconsin, where they both still live.

1974:

1973: I was born on September 27th at 4:44 am...or so they tell me. My parents named me after Jason of the Argonauts and Alexander the Great. Not exactly a humble beginning.

• The personal site of Jason Kottke. But also his full-time gig.
• A weblog, which is a frequently updated, chronologically ordered collection of hypertext fragments. You'll find the most recent posted stuff on the front page and many ways to get at the older posts on the archive page.
• My wunderkammer. Wunderkammer is a German word meaning, roughly, "cabinet of wonders" or "cabinet of curiousities". Julian Dibbell wrote about weblogs as wunderkammers for the dearly-departed Feed.
• Updated almost daily since March 1998.
• An attempt to track and make sense of "material that connects the insights of science and culture, rather than using one to dismantle the other" (as Steven Johnson puts it).
• Sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and even a bit of political purpose. (after George Orwell)
• Small pieces, loosely joined (after David Weinberger's book of the same name).
• Chock full of "wussy PoMo Sedaris-wannabe attitude" (source)
• Speed 3: The Weblog. If I stop writing, the bus will blow up. (source)
• A giant RFC document.
• Not all that it could be.
• Slashdot for the literati (comment via AIM).
• 

I really like Silkscreen. Do you know where I can find some similar fonts?
There are actually quite a few similar fonts out there. Here's a good place to start looking.

What fonts do you use on your site?
Over the past few years, I've used Silkscreen, DIN Mittelschrift, Orbital, Interstate, and Whitney.

Where do you live? What do you do for a living?
I live in New York, NY and write/edit kottke.org full-time.

Could you recommend some other sites like yours?
There's a list of the sites I read in the sidebar of the front page, but that's not quite the answer to the question. Here's what Google thinks is related to kottke.org.

How do you update your site? Can you help me set up a weblog?
I use a weblog tool called Movable Type. It lets me update my Web site from anywhere that has a net connection and a Web browser. It takes a bit of technical know how to set up, but works pretty smoothly once you get it running. If you want to start a weblog and don't want to bother with the setup, you could try TypePad, Blogger, Pitas, Diaryland, LiveJournal, or Wordpress. For further guidance, try We Blog, a book on weblogs by Paul Bausch, Matt Haughey, and Meg Hourihan.

How do you pronounce "Kottke"?
Kottke is pronounced by putting the words "cot" and "key" together. Cot+key = Kottke.

Are you related to guitarist Leo Kottke?
Nope, not even fourth cousins thrice-removed as far as I know. I am also unrelated to Dan Kottke, who was employee #1 at Apple Computer (after Woz and Jobs) and is a very nice fellow.

What kind of camera did you use to take the photos on your site?
It's usually a Nikon D70 or a Nikon Coolpix 990. I also occasionally use a Lomo Kompakt Automat. If you're looking to buy a new digital camera, I highly recommend the Digital Photography Review site as a place to start your search.

Why don't you ever answer your email, you heartless bastard?
I enjoy receiving email. I enjoy reading email. I am horrible at answering email because I get too damn much of it. If you send me email and I do not respond, please accept my most humble apologies and take heart that when I die, I will burn in Hell eternally for my poor correspondence manners.

What kind of music are you listening to these days?
You can find some of my thoughts on music here.

What software do you use to design your site?
I do 95% of the design in Photoshop (the other 5% in Flash & Illustrator). For the HTML, Perl, and PHP bits, I use TextMate and BBEdit. Simple flexible tools make things easy.