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About

I am a software developer living in Indianapolis, Indiana. My day job pays me to work on a Microsoft stack, and admittedly that is where most of my experience is. However, I am interested in all technology, regardless of the origin company.

Contact

You can contact me via the following means:

twitter: @yanigisawa
facebook: James Alexander
email: james@jamesralexander.com

About This Site

Web host - dreamhost.com

Blog Software - Drupal

The website is generated using the drupal CMS. Technically, Drupal does way more than simple blogging, which is all my site does currently, and I am under utilizing what it can do for me. However, I wanted to give myself opportunity to branch out in the future, plus as complicated as Drupal is, I was able to grok it quicker than Joomla, and had more features that I liked over Wordpress.

FAQ

Q: How do you pronounce 'yanigisawa'?
A: Just how it's spelled. Really, does it matter how one says it? Just shorten it to "yani" if you want to refer to it verbally. (though, I don't know why you would want to, "James" is easier to say) The background for this nickname I use on twitter and around the web is that in High School, I played a Yanagisawa brand of saxophone. My senior year, I started taking lessons from a college professor at Indiana State University, that was amused by the name, and said it really fast as if he were a Japanese samurai warrior. This amused me as well, and later when I needed to find a unique name to create an email account, I got frustrated trying to use my real name, and refused to append a number, (e.g. jalexander1234) as this just seemed cheesy to me. So, I remembered "yanigisawa" and it has been a unique name for me everywhere I go on the net.

Q: Why are you blogging?
A: Mostly just for kicks. I'm following advice from an episode of Pragmatic programmers, and Scott Hanselman who both say that all software developers should have a blog, an online presence, and gasp, a personal brand. I don't know about the whole personal branding idea, because a google search will never find me specifically amidst all the other James Alexanders of the world. Maybe that just means I need to fire my branding department and start fresh. :P