Questions I Feel Like Answering (QIFLA)

Everything you don't really need to know about me.

Who are Marchan, Dana, Martug, the Duke of Quirnotol...?

Almost all direct names I've been giving on this webiste since December 2004 are names of fictional people. I'm writing what's been was for sometime called a blook (a book in serial form originally published on a weblog). The main character is Marchan, a dwarf living in another time. Everyone else we've met so far are "normal" humans. You can get the whole Marchan story.

Esgaroth?

Esgaroth was my internet name, handle, nic, whatever. I used it when my first name could be confused with some other Alan, Allan, Allen, Alyn or Alon. I've since lengthened it to alesgaroth since I was able to grab the netscape.net, outlook.ca, gmail, linkedin, facebook, twitter handles that way, and even alesgaroth.com

Alan?

Alan is my name. Note there's only one 'l' and an 'a' on either side of it. I tend to resent other spellings. The second 'a' is usually elided when I pronounce it.

You?

I am a graduate of the University of Waterloo's Math undergraduate programme in Computer Science. Fall 2002 I returned to the University to get an Arts Degree in Medieval Studies, and I had fun with it. I finished it in April 2004. After that I worked for BlueStream, a spin-off of BlueTree which is a direct mail marketing company. Bluestream is the software development portion of that. Summer 2006 I went and got myself married. I'd love to tell you the story sometime of how my wonderful bride and I hooked up.

And then I moved on to Intellitactics which got bought up by Trustwave.
moved to a startup called Avvasi, left there to join NetSuite which got bought by Oracle. Moved on to a startup called Sortable, and from there moved to Google. Recently (March 2023) left there and will be landing at Arctic Wolf.

Returned to School?

Yup. I returned to school. And I think I did reasonably well. I passed everything in that first term, and the second term, even making the Dean's Honours List. I was off for the summer, then stayed on the Dean's List for the last two terms. First year language courses are always easy when you've been preparing for them for years. In winter 2006 I took a third year New Testament Greek Course.

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