Scott VonSchilling.com

So what’s the point of Scott VonSchilling.com?

Originally it came about shortly after I graduated from college, got a full-time job, and moved out of my house. My new job had me finally working with modern Web 2.0 technology and programming languages, so I wanted to use it to make my own unique and fancy homepage. Bought my namesake domain and programmed an aggregate of my twitter and flickr account.

But then a few months later, I turned my attention towards my anime blog, The Anime Almanac, and completely left my namesake domain alone. Around April of last year, I dug up my old PHP code to the original site and adapted it to Anime Almaanc the Live, a Twitter aggregate involving multiple accounts.

But after a year of working on the anime blog, I did a vanity search on me using Google and found that the only information it returns relating to me is about my work on the Anime Almanac. But writing about anime is not what I do for a living, it’s just my side project. I’m a software developer first and foremost, and so I ultimately need a professional homepage to show the world who Scott VonSchilling really is.

So away with the old aggregate site and up with the brand new Scott VonSchilling.com. But what should I put up on it? Just having a page with a bio, resume, and links would be too boring for a Web 2.0 being like myself. That is why you now see a new personal blog occupy this space.

It’s not the first time I’ve written a personal blogged. In high school, I created a website that chronicled all the silly and goofy things I would hear around the school. When I started college, I would write daily on a LiveJournal page in order to keep in contact with my long-distance girlfriend at the time.

But for some reason, my personal blogs (and my anime blog, now that I think about it…) have always generated a lot of trouble and controversy whenever people would read it. I always tried to find the funny and silly in my daily observations, and people didn’t like reading their life played back to them in a humorous way.

There was one jerk I knew back in high school who would say the dumbest things possible, but would say it in a very arrogant and snobbish way. If it wasn’t for the fact that he was such a jerk, I wouldn’t have paid so much attention to him. But because he was probably the only guy in the school who I particularly loathed, he got his own section devoted to him in my silly quotes blog.

About a month or so later, I was called into the principle’s office. I had never even seen the principle before - he was a very quite guy who kept out of the public eye. So to be facing him face-to-face like was probably something I never thought I would experience. So what got one of the most well-behaved students in the school face time with the man-in-charge himself?

That jerk had made a death threat to another student earlier in the day, and in those post-Columbine / pre-911 days, that was worst thing possible in world of education. So while the school was running an intense investigation over the jerk and his death threat, the subject of my “silly quotes” blog came up.

At first, I was called to the school’s head disciplinarian to tell her a little about the website and explain to her the URL and how to get there. After she chuckled a little over the blog’s tagline (”Dedicated to one of life’s biggest jokes - Teenage Conversation!”), she dismissed me and that was it.

Hours later, I was summoned to the principle’s office, who looked as if he was ready to pass out from fear and anger. He had told me that he had contacted the school’s lawyer over my website, and because I had mentioned specific teachers and students, the school could potentially be held accountable for the death threat made earlier that day. Well, I wasn’t one to argue to with principle or the school lawyer, so the site was quickly pulled down when I got home that day.

Years later, I saw the jerk on Facebook and sent in a friend request. I included a little note offeringing an olive branch and wishing to let bygones be bygones.

He quickly responded with a decline and a bold message, “WHY THE HELL WOULD I EVER WANT TO BE YOUR FRIEND?!?”

Yup, still a jerk after all these years… (-_-)

My LiveJournal blog lasted a lot longer than that, and saw it’s first controversy stem from one of my socially-dysfunctional roomates and the messed up relationship with his cheating girlfriend. Days after writing about this screwed up situation, both of them marched into my room with a printout of my blog. They demanded I remove those “slanderous” post immediately or they’d take the printouts to their lawyers.

It’s funny how lawyers always comes up like this. (-_-)

Unlike the school principle incident, I told them to put a sock in it and that was that. I now understood my freedom of speech, and everything I was writing was true. So they had no right to restrict me in that way.

But the final nail in the coffin for the LiveJournal account, after no longer having that long-distance girlfriend to communicate with, came from the episode in which my brother, only 18 and just started college, decided to become engaged to his on-again, off-again girlfriend of a few months. My whole family thought it was a joke, and we’d talk about how long it would take for the engagement to go away. And much to everyone’s relief, it ended in a couple of months. But unlike everyone else around me, I actually wrote about this ridiculousness onto the blog.

My brother got really pissed at me, and mentioned the blog to my mother. My freaking mother, who has no idea about the internet or computers in general, called me up one evening crying, and told me how upset over the blog!

Is this the kind of stuff that David Sedaris has to deal with when he writes about the funny thing that happens with his friends and family?

So my online chronicles of the wacky and silly world of Scott ended with that phone call from my mother. For years, all my writings were centered around the wacky and silly world of anime fandom. True, the anime blog still causes fury and controversy, the no one has ever threaten legal action against me. Instead, they gave me a press badge at conventions and occasionally pay me for freelance work.

I did eventually start up a personal Twitter page and now have this new blog to get off the ground. But the major difference now from a few years ago is that I actively watch what I write and often censor myself. Why? Because I am now employed by a company, and my livelihood depends on remaining to be employed by said company. If I say anything that would remotely tick anyone off in the professional world, I’m out of a job.

Not that I particularly have anything bad to say about my job or anyone there, just little quirky things I notice through out the work day. Funny things about being so much younger from the rest of my co-workers, or some of the craziness involved working with our government-based clients.

But you’ll never know of these funny things. It’s a secret.

Instead, I figure I’ll devote this blog to three different subjects: Pop-culture, technology, and life. I think that these are all very safe topics to write about, especially if the “life” parts are the non-professional things in my life, like the crazy antics of my cats.

If you want to know about what I do professionally, look at my resume. Visit some of the websites I’ve built. If you want to hear how much I love the new Lady Gaga track, check out the blog.

Scott VonSchilling is a professional software engineer, but he also tries to be a funny and entertaining person. Hopefully this new website will reflect both aspects of my character.

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