Forward

The Vanity Page on any web site simultaneously bothers me and draws me. Every time I go to someone's website I have to click on the "about me" link if there is one. Despite that, every web site I've made, I've deliberately avoided putting anything about myself. Too selfish a thing to put on a page, I figured. The content should be all that matters. But I keep thinking of what I'd like out this web page if I was the one visiting... and figured that, well, I'd want a vanity page to placate my voyeuristic streak. So for once, there is one.

For the sake of randomness, I'm going to split this into two parts: basic information about myself, followed by some out-of-left-field facts that help make some sense of who I am now, and why I'm doing what I'm doing.

Basic Information

My name is Rohan Harris. I'm 25, and live in Sydney, Australia - the city I grew up in.

I presently live on the upper north shore - a long way from anywhere expensive... and just slightly too far away from the city to make travel to the CBD anything but an annoyance. For years, I worked in the IT industry as everything from a computer technician up to a software developer, with network administration falling somewhere inbetween. I hold an MCSE from a by-gone era of Windows, and in a twist of irony, found my first job after becoming certified was entirely around non-Windows systems. After years of slowly working on a manuscript for a novel based extraordinarily loosely around experiences from both myself and people around me, I found - through dumb luck - an independent backer for my writing.

That was a year ago. The novel is now finished, and amidst further writing I found myself involved in both a tv show in a behind-the-scenes capacity, and directing a short film.

It was both of these things that prompted my further adventures into HD film-making. Jumpcut was a short film completed last year in a stupidly short time frame... and Rapida was the project that followed. As of now I'm writing a sequel to Inconvenient Things and I'm also knee-deep in shooting Rapida.

Left Field

  • My father owned and operated a second-hand bookstore when I was younger. I spent many of my earlier years sneaking around this cramped book-store, falling in love with the smell and texture of a good book. (For the curious, it was called Mr Books and was located at Martin Place)
  • My name was taken from The Lord of the Rings. While it's usually pronounced like the regular spelling of the name (Rowan), my parents used to pronounce it "properly" (Ro-han) when I got in trouble.
  • I was raised a vegetarian, and remain so to this day. However, I'm never sure from one moment to the next whether this is for moral reasons or because I can't differentiate between cooking meat and someone having just pressed an iron against some unlucky bastard's face.
  • I am highly technical, tinkering obsessively with everything from gadgets to operating systems.
  • I am an atheistic agnostic. If you think these two words shouldn't go together, go read Atheism: The Case Against God by George H. Smith. By Smith's logic (which I agree with) you can't actually be "agnostic" without being having either theistic or atheistic beliefs behind that. In short: an atheistic agnostic believes that we can never know if "God" exists, a theistic agnostic believes that "God" exists... but that we can never know his/her/it's true nature.
  • My favourite films are, in no particular order, Blade Runner, Fight Club, Sin City, The Tailor of Panama and Das Boot.
  • My favourite books are, again in no order, Ready, Okay! by Adam Cadre, White Jazz by James Ellroy, The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco by John Birmingham, Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis and Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk. I lied about the lack of order... sort of. It's no coincidence that Ready, Okay! features first on the list. I quite literally cannot praise Adam Cadre's novel highly enough. Nothing in this world has ellicited such strong emotions from me.
  • My favourite computer games are The Secret of Monkey Island, Quake and the any Grand Theft Auto game since GTA III.
  • My favourite gaming platform is a good Pentium 133 running MS-DOS 6.22. I keep two boxes of this sort around my house, ready to be fired up when the urge takes me.
  • Deadwood is the best television that has ever existed. More than that, it's probably the best story ever told. Period.
  • I use a Mac primarily, but have computers around the house with everything from Linux to DOS 6.22 to Windows XP on them.
  • I believe Microsoft is a bigger joke than George W. Bush, which is no easy feat.
  • Python and procedural C are the two most gorgeous programming languages I've ever encountered. True works of art.
  • I learnt to program in C by first learning QuakeC and then, once the source code was released, reading the Quake source code itself back to front. At one point, I considered wallpapering my room with a printout of the code. To this day I haven't seen a piece of software whose architecture I've admired more.
  • I've never smoked a cigarette, nor will I.
  • The funniest thing I've ever seen was a kitten take a flying leap from a kitchen bench and land in one of those bins with the flip-lids.
  • I want to live for six months in Los Angeles at some point in my life, and possibly for a similar length of time in New Orleans. Otherwise, I intend to live exclusively in Australia... and most likely nowhere but Sydney, preferably near water.
  • I have four fish tanks. Three freshwater, one marine. The latter is almost exclusively inhabited by bottom-feeding invertibrates. Fish are kinda dull next to crustacians and the like.
  • I don't have any "heroes", but I do feel that Robert Rodriguez is currently working on his projects in a way that I would like to be. Low to medium-budget productions, technically interesting, varied, and with reasonable autonomy.